The race card is back.

After Tuesday night's debate, Washington party-crossover dean David Gergen announced it was "too early" to declare victory for Democrat Barack Obama, not because the election is a month away, but because "Obama is black."

After GOP running mate Sarah Palin criticized Obama for seeing America as "imperfect enough that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their country," an Associated Press story suggested that "her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret."

A racially tinged subtext? Palin may have exaggerated about Obama "palling around" with William Ayers, a founder of the Vietnam War-era Weather Underground, which was responsible for a number of bombings across the country including quite possibly a 1970 explosion that left a San Francisco police officer dead. I don't think Obama and Ayers were pals so much as co-believers of a trendy left-leaning and standards-hostile philosophy on education.

And, Ayers is white. So it's hard to figure out how the AP writer construed Palin's remarks as "racially tinged," unless you see race in absolutely everything.

The "subtext" -- to borrow the word -- of the race-baiting charge is that if Obama should lose, then it will be because of racist white voters, who misled polling organizations by not saying that they would not vote for the Democratic nominee simply because he is black.

You could not watch cable news last week without hearing about "the Bradley effect" -- a term spawned after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost the California gubernatorial election to state Attorney General George Deukmejian in 1982 by one point, despite pre-election polls that showed Bradley, who was black, had a seven-point lead.

But "the Bradley effect" was not the election-turning factor that some people saw. As Mark DiCamillo of the Field Poll explained, a number of factors, including a higher-than-expected turnout of gun owners, led to the discrepancy in that 1982 race. DiCamillo believes that some white voters said they were undecided even though they had decided to vote for Deukmejian, and those undecided white voters were key in the undecided pool because most black voters had made up their minds to vote for Bradley. Continued...