Barack Obama has injected race into this campaign. Repeatedly. He mentions, unprompted and unprovoked, that “they” will talk about how he does not look like any other “presidents on those dollar bills.” The “they” is a straw man, employed by the Obama campaign to enhance his victim status. It certainly is not the McCain campaign, which has gone out of its way not to mention race. It is as if Obama believes he will get a certain number of sympathy votes for his racial pain. He is no new politician – he is the finishing school version of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

John McCain’s campaign calls him out, for diverting attention away from substance to race. The New York Times, in story number one today, justifies Obama’s raising of race because he was responding to negative attacks by John McCain.

Say what?

Of course John McCain has attacked Barack Obama!  He has attacked him for opposing new energy exploration. He has attacked him for being too inexperienced, and for being unqualified for the presidency. He has attacked him for his de facto plan that favors defeat over victory in Iraq. He has attacked him for a celebrity status that outstretches by miles the minimal substance in his suit. Someone had to do it – the media has largely abdicated their responsibility of being the balanced critic, preferring instead to occupy the role of a collective comfort woman to Barack Obama’s every stumbling move.

These attacks are not levied because Barack Obama is black – they are effective because they address real issues that ought to be preeminent in this campaign. Obama will not lose because he is “young”, “inexperienced”, “looks different”, has a “funny name”, or because Republicans are trying to make voters “scared” of him (though assuredly that is what many on the left will say post-mortem), it will be because he is not prepared to occupy the Oval Office, and his ideas are the seedlings of a national disaster. It is a nice try, however, to lop inexperience in as an irrelevant criticism with all the others. Obama’s straw man is Houdini and juggling clown all in one.

The polls should make Obama’s people nervous. For all the money spent, for all the earned media, and for all the adolescent infatuation that has come therewith, Barack Obama is still statistically tied with John McCain, and worse, does not enjoy a measurable difference in the polls targeting registered voters, which historically favor the Democrat candidate. Rubbing in some salt, his backpacking trip across Europe resulted in no bounce whatsoever.

Both Dukakis and Kerry were consistently up over double digits at this point. If anyone ought to be scared, it is Barack Obama’s campaign team.