Analysis: Race remains the political wild card

(JACKSON, Miss.) By accusing Barack Obama of playing the race card, John McCain hopes to shuffle the deck in a White House campaign that is scarcely begun, much less settled.

In so doing, the Republican made at least two political calculations.

He risked at least temporarily overshadowing a tough ad his campaign had unleashed depicting Obama as a celebrity in the Paris Hilton mold.

And by challenging Obama directly, he chose a course that Hillary Rodham Clinton shied away from in her losing campaign for the Democratic nomination, presenting the most serious black presidential candidate in history with a charge he could not let go unanswered.

"I think his comments were clearly the race card," McCain said Friday.

Obama called that ridiculous. "What I said in front of a 98 percent conservative, rural, white audience in Missouri is nothing that I haven't said before," he insisted.