Obama responds to Mccain's Race Card accusation

Barack Obama: I don't think it is accurate to say that my comments have nothing to do with race. Let me make this first point. Most of the people here here at this event in Union, Missouri. Almost none of you, maybe none of you, thought that was making a racially incendiary remark or playing the race card. It wasn't until John McCain's team started pushing it that it ended up being on the front page of the New York Times two days in a row. Here is what I was saying. I think this should be undisputed, that I don't come out of central casting when it comes to presidential races, for a whole range of reasons. I'm young. I'm new to the national scene. My name is Barack Obama. I am African-American. I was born in Hawaii. I spent time in Indonesia. I do not have the typical biography of a presidential candidate. What that means is that I'm sort of unfamiliar. People are still trying to get a fix on who I am and where I come from, what my values are and so forth in a way that might not be true if I seemed more familiar. And, so, what I think has been an approach to the McCain campaign is to say that he is risky. To try to divert focus from the fact that they don't have any new ideas when it comes to fixing the economy or dealing with health care or dealing with education. All those elements that make me unfamiliar feed into this notion that he may be a, quote, unquote, risky choice. That point, I don't think, is disputable. I don't think that's a point that has not been made by every single one of your publications, that you guys haven't pulled on repeatedly. It's a fact. Let me be clear. In no way do I think that John McCain's campaign was being racist. I think they are cynical. I think they want to distract people from talking about the real issues. So it's at peace with the Britney/Paris ad or the most recent website or the allegation that somehow I wouldn't go visit the troops unless I had reporters with me, which every reporter who was on the trip knows this is absolutely not true. It goes to the point I was making earlier. Their team is good at creating distractions and engaging in negative attacks and planting doubts about people. And what we've got to do is make sure that we are very clear to the American people about how my policies will make a difference in their lives. They can have confidence that I'm going to be for them and I am absolutely confident that the people in Union, Missouri or Jacksonville, Florida, or any other city or town across the country, at the end of the day, is going to be making their decisions based on what they think is going to be best for their lives and their children's lives. And if we can keep focus on that issue, how to make people's lives better, how do we get our economy out of the hole that we are in, I think we will do well.

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