McCain camp: Obama playing 'race card'

As Democrat Barack Obama accuses Republican John McCain of trying to scare voters, McCain's campaign manager is now accusing Obama of raising race.

Campaign manager Rick Davis issued a statement today saying, "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

At issue are comments that Obama made in Missouri on Wednesday.

"Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," Obama said. "You know, he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name, you know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."

Obama's campaign did not respond directly to the charge from Davis, but spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama was not referring to race in his comment.

"What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn't get here after spending decades in Washington," Gibbs said, according to the Associated Press. "There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn't come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race."

Davis elaborated this afternoon on MSNBC, saying that Obama's campaign and liberal bloggers are "actively feeding the notion" that McCain's campaign is doing and saying things with racial overtones.

"I don't know what else he was talking about," Davis said. "I just wanted to make it clear. To be honest, I don't know how else you explain the quote."

Obama, of course, is trying to become the first African-American elected president. McCain has not directly raised Obama's race as an issue in the campaign, though he has said that Obama lacks experience.

"Barack Obama in no way believes that the McCain campaign is using race as an issue, but he does believe they're using the same old low-road politics to distract voters from the real issues in this campaign, and those are the issues he'll continue to talk about," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said, according to the AP.

In an interview with CNN this afternoon, McCain stood by his campaign manager's accusation, saying it is fair criticism.

"It is. I'm sorry to say that it is. It's legitimate. And we don't -- there's no place in this campaign for that. There's no place for it and we shouldn't be doing it."

Asked about the Obama campaign's denials, McCain answered, "I'll let the American people judge."

UPDATE: Some commentators and bloggers are noting that Davis used similar language to Robert Shapiro, one of O.J. Simpson's defense lawyers, who after the former football star's 1995 acquittal on murder charges criticized the defense team for raising the race issue during the trial.

"My position was always the same, that race would not and should not be a part of this case. I was wrong. Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck," Shapiro said.