Word: races
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...every blue state, taken the lead in almost every purple state and gained small but solid leads in several large red states, including Ohio and Florida. John McCain was already bound by a limited set of combinations to reach 270 electoral votes; now, without a major change in the race's dynamic, he has no clear path. Sarah Palin revitalized her image with a folksy, defiant presentation, and McCain found a way to attack Obama with a smile, but neither performance changed the trajectory of the overall race. Obama and Joe Biden didn't take any big risks, but they...
...seen in historical perspective, the McCain campaign's strategy against Obama is actually kind of shocking. For years, the recipe for injecting race into a political campaign has been clear. First, invoke the specter of black crime, as Lee Atwater did in 1988 when he vowed to turn murderer Willie Horton into Michael Dukakis' "running mate." Second, attack lazy people in the inner city, as Ronald Reagan did in 1976 when he condemned a Chicago "welfare queen." Third, bash affirmative action, as the late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms did in 1990 when he ran an ad showing white hands...
Does that mean race doesn't matter this year? Hardly. It just matters in a different way. In the past, Republicans often used race to make their opponents seem anti-white. In 2008, with their incessant talk about who loves their country and who doesn't, McCain and Palin are doing something different: they're using race to make Obama seem anti-American...
...human brain is surely the most sophisticated data-processing machine in the world, except when it's not. In fact, in some ways our brains can be flat-out crude--like when they're dealing with matters of race...
...other tribes, who see you as a competitor for food and mates. Your very survival can turn on making this distinction quickly and reliably; as a result, the primal wiring that makes such discrimination possible is not very easy to disconnect. And in a culture like ours, in which race is an issue we grapple with nearly every day, the impulse may have heightened over time...