It seems that no matter how many times “the race issue” seems to fade to the background of this campaign, it doesn’t stay there for long. Recurring controversies about race are keeping the issue front and center in the contest between John McCain and Barack Obama.

The recent bout of back-and-forth over race began with a seemingly off-the-cuff made by Obama on the campaign trail:

“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 had made similar warnings to supporters in June that Republicans would try to scare voters by highlighting his race:

“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?“

This time, the McCain campaign responded immediately, accusing the Obama campaign of “playing the race card.”

‘He played it from the bottom of the deck,’ said [McCain campaign manager] Rick Davis. ‘It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.’

Politico reported that the McCain campaign said they wanted to cut off any possibility that criticism of Obama would be labeled as “racist.”

McCain aides say their goal is to pre-empt what they believe is Obama’s effort to paint any conventional campaign attacks as race-based.

Obama’s aim, in the view of the McCain camp: “to delegitimize any line of attack against him,” said McCain aide Steve Schmidt. He said he saw that potential trap being sprung when Obama predicted in Missouri Wednesday that the GOP nominee would attack the Democrat because he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

“I don’t [care] whether it helps or hurts us,” Schmidt said. “A lie unresponded to becomes the truth.”

[Schmidt, no doubt, was referring to articles such as this one from Newsweek, which implies that virtually all opposition to Obama is due to the fact that a) he's black and they're racists, or b) false rumors that he's a Muslim, and they're Islamophobic.]

Initially, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe denied that Obama’s “dollar bills” remark was in any way referring to race: “We weren’t suggesting in any way he’s using race as an issue.” Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs emphasized that “it is not about race.”

However, Obama admitted the next day that his comment was referring to race. Campaign manarger David Axelrod went on to explain:

“He’s not from central casting when it comes to candidates for president of the United States. He’s new to Washington. Yes, he’s African-American.”

Earlier in the week, the McCain campaign released a controversial TV ad that called Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world” — comparing him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears — but questioned whether Obama was “ready to lead.”

Many criticized McCain’s ad as “juvenile” and denounced his turn towards “negative campaigning,” but some critics — such as the New York Times editorial board — went further, saying the McCain ad was implicitly racist because it juxtaposed pictures of Obama, a black man, alongside young white women (Hilton and Spears):

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

That whole line of attack seems puzzling to me: would the Times and like-minded critics prefer that the McCain ad had featured prominent black female celebrities? Wouldn’t that have perhaps even seemed even more racist, by emphasizing Obama’s African-American-ness?

Polls show that far more voters saw Obama’s “dollar bills” comment as racist (53 percent) than McCain’s “Celeb” ad (22 percent).

But it didn’t stop there. David Gergen called this McCain ad “coded racism.” (The ad poked fun at Obama’s alleged arrogance, sarcastically calling him “The One” and showing a clip of Moses, as portrayed by Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, parting the Red Sea.) But Gergen alleged that in fact the charge that Obama is “arrogant” was just “code” for saying he was “uppity.”

“There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, ‘he’s not one of us,’”…”I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it’s the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, ‘The One,’ that’s code for, ‘he’s uppity, he ought to stay in his place.’ Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, ‘I’m against quotas,’ we get what that’s about.

But Gergen wasn’t alone. The L.A. Times’ David Shipler also devoted an entire column to the argument that calling Obama “elitist” was simply a racist code word for “uppity.”

“Elitist” is another word for “arrogant,” which is another word for “uppity,” that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.

Conservative bloggers ripped Gergen’s remarks, and fought back against the notion that any criticism of Obama’s perceived arrogance was racist:

If you take this logic to its conclusion, there’s literally no non-racist way to accuse a member of a minority group of having an outsized ego. Any synonym you can conjure — elitist, arrogant, “megalomaniac narcissist” (to quote Hitchens) — can all happily be dismissed as “code”…

[...]The real “tell” here, though, is what Gergen offers as further evidence to support his point — that McCain, when asked about affirmative action, said he opposes quotas. A perfectly mainstream conservative position, and certainly one McCain would also hold if he was facing Hillary, but because he’s facing Obama McCain’s no longer allowed to talk about it.

Others argued — much as McCain strategist Steve Schmidt did above — that the charges of racism were a deliberate tactic to stifle and cut off debate and criticism:

But the intent of branding me with the scarlet “R” of racist is not simply to inflict pain but rather to stifle and cut off debate[...]Denials only give credence to the charge. Having to disavow you are a racist gives the battle to your opponent because anything you might say to defend yourself can be twisted and deliberately misconstrued as more evidence of racism. On the other hand, silence denotes assent in many people’s minds so not saying anything is as good as being forced to walk around wearing that scarlet “R” on your bodice.

Here’s my take: In the primaries, Obama claimed to be the “post-racial” candidate; the candidate that would — rather than highlight racial differences — instead reach beyond traditional racial divisions to unite all Americans. Yet Obama’s frequent warnings of an imminent wave of race-related scare tactics from Republicans seems completely contradictory to that goal.

Rather, it has been Obama who has injected race into the campaign: Neither the RNC nor McCain have made any racial attacks against Obama. Even Obama himself was forced to clarify, after the recent controversy:

“In no way do I think John McCain’s campaign was racist. I think they are cynical,” Obama said Saturday.

It is repulsive to slander half the country as racists for criticizing what they see as hubris in a candidate simply because that candidate is black. Or to imply that millions of conservatives who, like McCain, oppose affirmative action quotas are now suddenly racists, as Gergen did. Right or wrong, the criticism that Obama is too full of himself should be fair game for debate. Likewise, one can bash McCain’s “Celeb” or “The One” ads as petty, stupid, or weak — but calling them racist is beyond the pale.