Bird’s-Eye View

Time Magazine’s Michael Grunwald uses Republican John McCain’s visit to Manheim Central as a basis to begin a discussion about how race is impacting the presidential campaign. Here’s how Grunwald starts his article:

On a swing through Pennsylvania last month, John McCain visited a Manheim Central High School football practice — not to ingratiate himself with the players, who weren’t even old enough to vote, but to identify himself with the gritty, down-home lunch bucket values of small-town football. “This is a blue-collar town,” Manheim’s coach said in his introduction of McCain. “We don’t have a lot of flashy athletes. We don’t come out with a lot of flash.” But the coach explained that his team works hard, plays with discipline, and comes through in the end. “A lot like John McCain,” he said.

If you’re familiar with the code words of the sports world, you’ve probably already guessed that Manheim’s players had something else in common with McCain: They were white. On the other hand, athletes who get described as “flashy” almost invariably have something in common with Barack Obama. I’m not saying the coach was trying to inject race into his discussion of flashiness. I’m saying that sometimes we talk about race even when we’re not talking about race — in presidential politics as well as sports. Sports announcers have at least made an effort to shed their stereotypes; they occasionally describe black players as “scrappy” or “blue-collar,” adjectives that used to be reserved for whites. But for political pundits, “working-class” or “blue-collar” or even “small-town” voters still means white; blacks have their own category.

It’s a pretty charged article which looks at just how far America has come and whether enough whites are reluctant to vote for a black man to keep Democrat Barack Obama from winning the presidency.

I don’t think race played any part in McCain deciding to stop by Manheim Central. I do know that Lancaster Republicans screamed as loud as they could to get him to stop in the Garden Spot when the Arizona senator, along with U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, held a townhall rally in York last month. The image of McCain wearing his famous Navy ball cap giving a pep talk on Central’s famous field to Central’s famous footballers was more about firing up voters in an area McCain absolutely must crush Obama in or lose Pennsylvania.