Wes Pruden: Taking a switch to the candidates

...the Clintons, with a little help from Barack Obama, have loosed the race issue on us just when we thought all that had been put to rest.

...Bubba has played the race card before, once at the expense of old friends at home when he said he remembered the shame he felt for the black churches torched when he was a barefoot boy in Arkansas. It turned out that he remembered something no one else, black or white, did. An investigation revealed that no church black or white had ever been torched in Arkansas.

Roger Simon: The race card has been dealt

The race card is on the table, and it doesn’t matter who dealt it first. All that matters now is who plays it best.

“This is a defining moment,” Obama says in his stump speeches. “We are one nation, we are one people, and our time for change has come.”

And then he says: “There are folks all over the planet watching what we are doing.”

Translation: By voting for Barack Obama, you can prove to yourself, the nation and the world that you are not racist and that America has become a better place, a place decent enough to elect a black person to the presidency.

To the Clinton campaign, this is grossly unfair. When it is accused of playing the race card, it says Obama plays the race card every day.

In the contest for black votes, Clinton is trying to make the case that she has been working longer and harder for minorities than Obama has.

In the contest for white votes, Clinton says she is better qualified, more experienced and ready to lead from day one.

And though she doesn’t say it, her campaign knows that just as there are some people who will vote for Obama because he is black, there are some people who never will vote for him for the same reason.

Hillary Clinton is not electable because she is too polarizing, some of her opponents say.

She is far more electable than a black man, some of her supporters say.

The race card is on the table in this election. And it is not coming off.

The racial row that's dividing the Dems

... never have two candidates so seemingly committed to the same cause taken out after each other -- with supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton saying her opponent Sen. Barack Obama is "no Martin Luther King," as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) did yesterday, and Obama supporters accusing Clinton of race-baiting.

Some see it as supremely ironic that this fight has broken out in a historic presidential campaign in which both a woman and an African American are positioned to potentially break one of the hardest glass ceilings in American society.