We all had a good chuckle a while back when an obscure columnist claimed that McCain-Palin's invocation of "socialist" to describe Obama's economic policies was a code word for black. Well, here are the less obscure John Judis of The New Republic and Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress saying more or less the same thing, in a more sophisticated way.

Look, it's reasonable to say that attacks on "welfare queens" or Willie Horton or inner city crime or whatnot can stir latent prejuice in voters, whether or not that was the intent of the attacker. But (and I say this as someone who has spent a good part of his academic career writing about the economics and the history of race in the U.S., and also someone who thinks it's silly to claim that Obama's policies are "socialist") "spreading the wealth" and "socialism" are so far removed from any racial subtext that I can't help but see pieces like this as attempts to silence any criticism of Obama by playing the race card, period. I should note that with very few exceptions it's been Obama's supporters, and not the Obama campaign, that's tended to try to find a racial subtext to any criticism of Obama, no matter how mundane.