Now, the admitted problem with criticzing McCain for exploiting this situation is that McCain didn’t really create it, he’s just using whatever advantages he has, one of the primary advantages being that he’s white. That certainly matters to some people, and so taking advantage of those images and tropes is sound campaign strategy in a world without clear moral guidance and a narrow demographic profile. The good news is that this doesn’t work on a very large portion of the electorate. The bad news is that it doesn’t need to in order to be effective. Besides, McCain is twisting things around in so many other areas it’s just one of many objections to his sleazy, content-free campaign. Some of us expected better of McCain, but some of us also expected better of Clinton. The real problem is that race can’t even be discussed without people getting up in arms about it, and dismissing any notion that McCain’s campaign could be playing on racist tropes when it clearly is, simply because to admit that is thought to be catastrophic to his campain, which in reality it is not. Clinton’s campaign was not hurt by such accusations, but if anything actually helped. Mild racism is not nearly as unpopular as the media likes to portray it. In fact, it creates a backlash precisely because there are plenty of people who will defend their mildly racist views, which they consider perfectly acceptable, and react to the notion that this makes them “bad people”. That’s why it’s always a good idea to inject just a little bit of racism into a campaign like this. It can’t really lose either way.