The Note: Card Check

August 1, 2008 -- Maybe the Straight Talk Express needed to break down to get ready for this highway.

We can debate who played which card to what end, but Team McCain has placed its hand on the table -- a big gamble that puts his political nest egg on the line.

Yet this debate makes Sen. Barack Obama put some chips on the table too. Sen. John McCain's team is not executing perfectly, but it has managed to dominate the discussion for a sustained period of time -- possibly for the first time in the general election.

(And how much is it helped by a Congress that's leaving town without an energy bill -- and with Obama lacking a pat answer on the subject.)

Yes, the race has devolved into a he-started-it playground fight that diminishes both candidates. Yes, the McCain brand shrinks when he makes the campaign about Obama.

But consider: Isn't it the case that the more conventional this campaign is, the better it is for the conventional(-looking/sounding/acting) candidate? (That split among registered and likely voters answers the question: If this is just any other race -- not to mention a race about race -- might it be noisy enough to make young voters want to cover their ears?)

"The tactic could cut both ways: it might tap into the qualms some white, working-class voters in crucial swing states may have about a black candidate, or it could ricochet back against the McCain campaign, which has been accused even by some fellow Republicans of engaging in overly negative campaigning in recent days," Michael Cooper and Michael Powell report in The New York Times.

And forget the race card: Top McCain aide Steve Schmidt plays the Clinton card. "We have waited for months with a sick feeling knowing this moment would come because we watched it incur with President Clinton. Say whatever you want about President Clinton, his record on this issue is above reproach," Schmidt tells the Times.

Howard Wolfson chooses to play -- and chooses his words carefully: "The McCain campaign has obviously been watching our primary very closely and recognized how damaging it had been to be tagged with the charge of race baiting," says the former Clinton campaign communications director.

At least one prominent Democrat plays the McCain card in response: "What they did to McCain in 2000 is what McCain's trying to do to Barack Obama in 2008," Dick Harpootlian, a former South Carolina Democratic chairman, tells the Los Angeles Times' Mark Z. Barabak and Nicholas Riccardi.

Who wins if there's a replay of the Democratic primary race? "The exchange was reminiscent of several flare-ups over race during the Democratic primaries, when the Obama campaign complained about comments made by Bill Clinton in support of the candidacy of his wife," Jonathan Weisman and Juliet Eilperin write in The Washington Post.

Says McCain (just maybe rightly): "What we are talking about here is substance, and not style."

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis defended the Paris/Britney ad, on ABC's "Good Morning America" Friday: "It's getting a lot of attention, which is exactly what it was designed to do," he said. "Everybody's talking about it, and we're having a great time with it."

Responded Obama strategist David Axelrod: "They ran a ridiculous ad that's insulting not to us, but to the American people, he said. "This is beneath him. It's beneath Sen. McCain.. . . . And now, to inject this race card issue takes it one step beyond that. You have to ask, what happened to John McCain? What happened to the campaign he promised to run?"

That's the sound of narratives colliding.

"Both sides face risks and opportunities," Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith write for Politico. "Obama's pioneering status is inspiring to some voters and discomfiting to others, and the way in which race is discussed may push voters toward or away from him. McCain could benefit from discomfort with race or he could -- like Hillary Rodham Clinton, his predecessor in battling Obama -- be distracted and ultimately diminished by constant charges of racism, accurate or not."

"For a week he's been on defense," Republican consultant Phil Musser said of Obama. "It's the first time in a while -- and he doesn't like it."

The New York Times editorial board doesn't like it, either: "The retort was, we must say, not only contemptible, but shrewd. . . . It also -- and we wish this were coincidence, but we doubt it -- [conjures] up another loaded racial image. The phrase dealing the race card 'from the bottom of the deck' entered the national lexicon during the O.J. Simpson saga."

(Responded Rick Davis, on "GMA," never missing a chance to whack the paper of record: "This is just another low blow by them.")

The Obama campaign wants you to remember who's delivering the message: "It seems like we hit another low note every day from this campaign," campaign manager David Plouffe told reporters Thursday, per the Chicago Tribune's John McCormick.

That's the genesis of the "Low Road Express," per ABC's Jake Tapper.

McCain's campaign has "also suggested that Obama would rather lose a war than an election, is personally responsible for the rise in gas prices, and is a celebrity on the order of tabloid divas Britney Spears and Paris Hilton," David Jackson and Kathy Kiely point out in USA Today.

As for the backlash: "The big question for the McCain campaign . . . is whether this is worth of John McCain, or whether it demeans him with frivolousness," ABC's Jake Tapper reported on "Good Morning America" Friday.

"Three months before Election Day, John McCain's stepped up aggression begs the question: Will voters vote for the scold?" the AP's Jim Kuhnhenn reports. "In striking an aggressive pose, McCain is in danger of letting the caricature of an angry, petulant candidate take seed -- not so much because he is one, but because it stands in stark contrast to Obama's carefully cultivated, well, celebrity, and McCain's own promises to run a respectful campaign."

McClatchy's David Lightman and William Douglas: "If voters find that Obama's image doesn't match the one McCain is peddling, they may reject him, a lesson Jimmy Carter learned in 1980 when he painted Ronald Reagan as dangerous and out of touch."

"In a celebrity-driven culture that has left little space for John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate has decided to go tabloid," Howard Kurtz writes in The Washington Post.