Op-Ed Columns

Welcome to the most polite, eggshell-sensitive presidential campaign in 36 years: SHHHhhhhhhhhhh. You may quietly mention the male candidate's name, but for heaven's sake don't say he's black, which he is, because that would be playing the race card.

Bill Clinton mentioned that Jesse Jackson, like Barack Obama, had carried South Carolina, which gave New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd a hissy fit.

"Bill is propelled by Cheneyesque paranoia," she screeched. "Bill's visceral reaction to Obama … is rooted less in his need to see his wife elected than in his need to see Obama lose, so that Bill's legacy is protected."

A "pathological path" is the way she described the Clinton campaign. Speaking of pathological, the men in white coats ought to come after Maureen with a butterfly net. After a rest, she'll be back to normal: uppity and mean.

Maureen's toxic tongue and habit of lofty condescension to presidents and primates may stem from the fact that she was the last of five children to an Irish District of Columbia police investigator. That might toughen a redheaded girl.

Her hair-trigger sensitivity about the race issue evidently is rooted in the fact that she was a schoolgirl during the civil rights movement and graduated college after the movement was over.

With respect due to her entertaining style and Pulitzer Prize (which I haven't won), I can say, "Child, you haven't seen the race card played until you've been a liberal journalist in George Wallace's Alabama."

I know something about the race card, like: "He's a integratin', skallawaggin', pool-mixin', bald-faced liar," or "He wants to bus little school chillun all over town," and "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation today, Segregation tomorrow ... Segregation forever!"

As I said, Maureen, I know the race card and the Clintons are no racists.

One of your colleagues, Times columnist Paul Krugman, agrees with media scholars that the national media tend to inflate even mild comments by the Clintons into the explosive potential of hand grenades.

A recent and outrageous example of twisted media interpretation that Krugman points to is MSNBC's David Shuster, who said of Chelsea campaigning for her mother, "doesn't it seem Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way."

Maureen's hysteria and Shuster's pornographic wit are out of sync with the behavior of the candidates themselves and wildly out of proportion with the real dirty campaigns of the recent past.

A treatise on the race card was given in an interview with the brilliant manipulator Lee Atwater in Alexander Lamis' book, The Two Party South. Atwater wasn't named in the book but was later identified as the speaker.

He was asked about Ronald Reagan appealing to the racist Wallace voter by saying that he would do away with legal services and cut back on appropriations for food stamps.

Atwater answered, "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now (that) you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites …

"You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"

Atwater got a chance to use an abstraction so obvious no political junkie will ever forget it: the Willie Horton episode that George H.W. Bush used against Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis in the 1988 campaign.

Horton, a black man, had committed rape while on a furlough from a Massachusetts prison where he was serving a life term for murder.

Bush seized on the Horton case, bringing it up repeatedly in campaign speeches. Bush's campaign manager, Atwater, predicted that, "by the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name." According to one political writer, Horton never went by the name "Willie"; Atwater called him that "hoping to get more racial mileage."

The Willie Horton campaign was the last of the racially tinged dirty tricks for Lee Atwater. In 1990, he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. His last days were spent apologizing for the person he had been to the decent men, including a close South Carolina friend of mine, he had so savagely sabotaged.

Lee Atwater had nothing to do with Richard Nixon's dirty tricks, which forced him out of office, and Atwater was no longer living during the "Swift Boat Campaign" that befouled the heroic naval career of Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 election, but several past GOP operatives have confessions to make.

Hysterical commentary about this cleanest, mildest campaign in memory may say more about the emotional soundness of the commentators than the candidates, both of whom have said they were friends before and will be friends when the campaign is over.

For me, finding the race card in this campaign is … a card trick: now you see it; now you don't.