Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Related: NY Times Attacks McCain With Bizarre Claim Of Racism, Excuses Hussein

And stunningly blames McCain for starting what he started. Weasel. Coward. Dangerous. Idiot to think we are all that stupid.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Trading charges anew over who was guilty of injecting race into the presidential debate, a subject unlikely to fade away, the campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama also blamed each other Friday for its increasingly negative tone.

McCain has accused Obama of playing politics with race for predicting that the likely Republican nominee and others in the GOP would try to scare voters by saying the Democrat “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” Obama’s spokesmen denied he was referring to being black, although all the presidents on U.S. currency are white.

(From Earlier PD Post: Incredulously, after Mcain attacked Obama for making such a charge, and Obama suddenly realizes that he’s fucked, issues a statement throuh his top staff that only a 5 year old could believe in any way ( apparently this guy’s as comfortable at lying as he is with using the word “I”): “He was not reffering to the fact that he’s black , but to the fact that he’s a Washington outsider.” When asked by The Associated Press what Obama meant by the comparison, Obama strategist Robert Gibbs said Thursday morning that the senator was not referring to race.

“What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington,” Gibbs said. “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.” )

Obama senior strategist David Axelrod said Friday that race became an issue only when the McCain campaign cast a racial slant on Obama’s remarks, which were made at a campaign swing Wednesday in rural Missouri.

The next day, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis issued a statement claiming that Obama had played “the race card” and calling the remarks “divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

“We are not going to let anybody paint John McCain, who has fought his entire life for equal rights for everyone, to be able to be painted as racist,” Davis said Friday on “Today” on NBC. “We’ve seen this happen before and we’re not going to let it happen to us.”

Axelrod rejected the charge and repeated the assertion that Obama was talking about his status as a young, relative newcomer to Washington politics.

“Barack Obama never called John McCain a racist,” Axelrod said on “The Early Show” on CBS. “What Barack Obama was saying is he’s not exactly from Central Casting for presidential candidates.”

Axelrod criticized McCain for saying he was “proud” of a TV spot linking Obama to stars Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggesting that while popular around the world Obama wasn’t qualified to lead the U.S.

“They’ve been running a negative campaign for weeks,” Axelrod said on NBC. “We’re not going negative in return. We’re refuting the charges.”

Davis, appearing on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” countered: “It’s a great ad and everybody’s talking about it and we’re having a great time with it.”

As far as who was responsible for the campaign’s negative tone, Davis said on NBC: “We didn’t draw first blood. I mean, this campaign has been rough and tumble since the day Barack Obama got his nomination, and we’ve withered under the attacks of the Obama campaign on a daily basis.”