Hi, there. I'm relatively new around here, so let me introduce myself first. I'm a young woman, still a student, in Montreal who follows politics the way some people follow soap operas. There's nothing like watching a televised political debate while blogging with one hand and shovelling in hot, buttered popcorn with the other. Oh, yum. Usually, Quebec politics keep me busy enough (rule of thumb: when it comes to politics, and some other things, French Canadians do it better than the Anglophones). But I have to hand it to you Americans: this year's election season is... well, it's my hot hot sex, to quote the iPod Touch commercials. And boy, does the American media know how to put on a show. You guys have turned democracy into a multibillion dollar entertainment industry! (That is only meant to be a little snarky... truly, I admire how involved your country is in this election.)

So I woke up this morning, read Drudge, the great Orange Monster (dKos), HuffPo, Talking Points Memo, Politico (yeah, I feel dirty)... my usual rounds... then steeped some coffee in the bodum and turned on the TV to see what CNN was talking about (they make me want to laugh and cry at the same time). There was an interview with the reclusive former president Bill Clinton. The question was, do you have any regrets about the way you behaved during your wife's campaign? Somehow, it was immediately obvious to me, and apparently to president Clinton as well, that the reporter was referring to some comments made in South Carolina which many perceived as racist, or "playing the race card." I remember that Bill Clinton had tried to diminish Obama's victory in SC by commenting that "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice."

Clinton defended himself by saying that he was "not a racist" and had never "attacked Obama personally." Then --- and this is what really gets me --- we go back to the CNN studio, where John Roberts says, "but isn't Bill Clinton playing the race card by bringing that up? I thought we were trying to get away from race in this election."

I swear, I choked up an entire mouthful of my arabian mocha sanani. (I'm a card-carrying latte-sipping liberal who is working part-time at Starbucks this summer, so the Right can hate me for having pretentious tastes and the Left can hate me for working at Starbucks.) Anyway, I could not believe that Roberts had the testicular fortitude to say that he thought "we were trying to get away from race in this election."

What!? Who's "we"?! Certainly not the media! After the media pounced on Bill Clinton for those SC comments (rightly or wrongly, but either way they dragged it out for way too long), then, ever so subtly asked him about it again in this interview, then accused him a second time of playing the "race card" when he tried to answer their question... it was too much for me. I had to turn it off. And that rarely happens. Usually, I enjoy yelling back at the screen and then blogging about it in CAPS.

It's come to the point where the phrase "race card" is used whenever anyone makes any reference at all, in any way, to race in this election. For example, I think the media unfairly accused McCain's campaign of using the "race card" when he aired that commercial juxtaposing Paris Hilton with Barack Obama (apparently some on the Left thought the ad was targeting people who are uneasy about mixed race couples... an argument I can't wrap my head around at all.) And I think the media unfairly accused Obama's campaign of using the "race card" when he stated the obvious fact that McCain is trying to make people nervous about voting for him because he "doesn't look like other presidents."

Here's what I want to talk about in this thread. Do you think either campaign has used to so-called "race card," or do you think that this is just a phrase the media likes to throw around because it produces ratings and sells papers? (What is the "race card"? Does anybody know what this phrase actually means?)