This Kabuki invites the question: What is Obama’s rationale?

It’s racial politics, and goes like this: Because I’m a minority, you can’t use race but I can. If you do, I’ll zap you. And if you don’t and I do and you call me on it, I’ll zap you for even suggesting I’m playing racial games.

But racial politics is loaded with risk.

Obama needs to maximize minority turnout while pulling enough white votes to win. Yet the polls in this campaign are all over the place, meaning there’s no telling how Obama’s racial games will play out.

Many sufferers of white guilt want desperately to vote for an African-American to prove to themselves — if to no one else — that they are not racist. Still, the extremist views of Obama’s preacher Jeremiah Wright, and now the playing of the race card by Obama himself, may combine to generate in guilt sufferers the sentiment, not this time.

Nor dare we forget ideology. Liberalism bears its own heavy racial-ethnic burdens: Liberal college administrators imposed Ivy League admission quotas on Asians and Jews. And liberals of various professional stripe turned Anita Hill in their efforts to stop the confirmation of the conservative Clarence Thomas, who writes eloquently (in “My Grandfather’s Son”) about the extent to which the leftist concept of affirmative action robs blacks of their dignity.

Obama’s shameless playing of the race card — his combining of race with liberal ideology — might prove his undoing in what remains a deeply conservative culture. It raises profound questions about his judgment and leadership, and may leave him in voters’ minds precisely the inexperienced, insubstantial, immature celebrity of John McCain’s description.