Issue of Race Creeps Into Campaign

Whether race played a role in helping Clinton win states such as Pennsylvania during the primaries is a matter of debate. One in eight Democratic primary voters in that state were whites who said race was a big factor in their vote, and more than three-quarters of those voters opted for Clinton. Obama advisers insist their results matched their predictions and public polls in most places, although they acknowledge that most voters who were undecided late in the process broke for Clinton.

That late-breaking trend has been interpreted by some to mean that voters had hesitations about voting for an African American. Some Democrats fear the same could happen on Nov. 4, referring to the phenomenon sometimes called the Bradley effect, after the Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, who lost the 1982 California governor's race despite being ahead in the polls. ("The Bradley race was 26 years ago, okay?" Plouffe countered. "That's before the Internet, before cellphones. It's ridiculous.")

But the campaign is using Clinton to campaign for Obama in areas where a Bradley effect would be considered most possible. Today, she and her husband are campaigning with Obama's running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), in Scranton, Pa., a largely white, working-class city where both she and Biden have family ties.

There were, before this weekend, few race-related clashes during the general election campaign. One took place in Missouri on July 31, when Obama issued something of a preemptive strike: "What they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know: 'He's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name.' You know, 'He doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.' "

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis quickly charged that Obama "played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck" -- a line the campaign has used when it felt that Obama, far from being a victim, was seeking to turn the race issue to his advantage.

During the second presidential debate, McCain offhandedly referred to Obama as "that one," a term that black commentators and others seized on as racially derogatory. Again, the McCain campaign suggested that its hands were tied: It cannot say anything negative without being accused of racism. Nicolle Wallace, a senior strategist for McCain, was later quoted as saying that complaints about the remark showed that the Obama campaign was "again proving to be the fussiest campaign in American history."

Since McCain became the Republican nominee, aides stress, he has taken pains to reach out to blacks, addressing both the NAACP and the Urban League. In April, he stood in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where he promised to be the president of "all the people."

But each new incident reinforces what operatives on the ground describe as a perpetually volatile matter, however calm Obama's strategists might be.

Local elected officials have had to devise their own playbooks for handling and discussing race, several said. In Youngstown, Ohio, last month, two Democratic state legislators accused swing voters who were not backing Obama of being racist. "Race -- that's the only reason people in the Valley won't vote for him," state Rep. Thomas Letson said, referring to the Mahoning Valley, in remarks printed in the city newspaper.

Local Republicans denounced the comments, and the Obama campaign distanced itself from the incident.

But supporters elsewhere say it is foolish to pretend race is a nonissue. Rendell, in a line that makes some Obama advisers cringe, frequently tells audiences that they simply cannot afford to be racist. "If you're drowning in the middle of a river, and there is someone on the shore with a rope," Rendell says, "you don't care what religion he is, what race he is, what his family situation is. All you care about is, does he have a strong right arm? And Senator Obama has a strong right arm."

In Ohio, Strickland delivered his own version of the fear-not speech Friday, as he campaigned with Obama in Chillicothe.

"I also know you to believe in this region that we are a people who honor family and faith, and in this campaign, unfortunately, there have been those who have tried to spread untruths about Barack Obama," Strickland said. "Barack Obama is a strong, Christian, family man."

In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson (D) said Hispanics are not holding back on voting for an African American, as some Democrats had feared.

"Look, there will still be some that vote based on race, but I think it will be a very, very small minority, because of the economic crisis we find ourselves in," he said. Referring to race, Richardson said: "I don't have to talk about that. The economy is doing it for us."

Staff writers Robert Barnes and Michael D. Shear contributed to this report.