Everyone’s talking about the ghetto-isation of Obama — how come he got so black all of a sudden? Some pundits are predicting that if he wins South Carolina it will be seen as the black folks rallying around their candidate, and if whites and ladies don’t move from Hillary to Barry that will finally confirm to Democrats that it would be electoral suicide to run a black candidate. So how does Obama talk his way out of this one?

But one name is overshadowing any discussion of race, gender, polls and the exit of Republican candidate Fred Thompson. Bernanke. His surprise decision to cut interest rates has everyone talking about the American economy, the issue that’s set to trump all others in this election:

Get out of the ghetto: …the idea that Obama has been “ghettoized” as the “black” candidate has become the accepted template for the campaign–even the point that a win in hotly contested South Carolina on Saturday is seen as actually hurting Obama because (in Dick Morris’ analysis) “[w]atching blacks block vote for Obama will trigger a white backlash that will help Hillary win Florida and to prevail the week after.” …The most promising candidate is not a person, but an idea: race-based affirmative action. Obama has already made noises about shifting to a class-based, race-blind system of preferences. What if he made that explicit? Wouldn’t that shock hostile white voters into taking a second look at his candidacy? He’d renew his image as trans-race leader (and healer). — Mickey Kaus, Slate

Triggering the white backlash: Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race — and Obama ultimately loses. — Dick Morris, RealClearPolitics 

Who pulled the race card from the deck? From the start of his career, Obama wanted, and needed, to remove the race card from the political deck. While it isn’t clear from whose sleeve the card was pulled, it is likely it wasn’t from the person with the most to lose. If Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken only one shot at Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But four shots constitutes a pattern, with Clinton’s former New Hampshire chairman, Bill Shaheen, Representative Charles Rangel, Clinton pollster Mark Penn and Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson all getting into the act. — Margaret Carlson, Bloomberg

Edwards the headless chicken: Edwards right now is like the headless chicken who keeps on moving even though it’s already dead. By saying this, I’m not rooting for him to leave the Democratic race. I’m merely offering the factual observation that his time as a first-tier national candidate has expired, probably forever. Two reasons: He doesn’t have the money to compete in the long run. And he’s not going to win anything in the short run. — Dick Polman’s American Debate

Bernanke’s gamble: Bernanke’s gamble isn’t guaranteed to succeed. Since World War II the Fed’s greatest blunder was to unleash double-digit inflation. In 1960 consumer prices rose 1.4 percent; in 1979 the increase was 13.3 percent. With hindsight it’s clear that Fed policies were too loose, creating too much money chasing too few goods. But that was not so apparent at the time, when the Fed responded to public pressure to minimize recessions and keep unemployment down. It loosened money and credit, and the effects on inflation showed up a couple of years later. There was a steady upward creep; that is the risk Bernanke is now running. — Robert J Samuelson, Newsweek

The politics of an economic meltdown: A possible economic meltdown is worrisome enough, but a possible meltdown in an election year is downright frightening. For months now, Republicans have been pushing the White House to take some action that looked and sounded big enough to give them some cover if and when things got worse. President Bush has now responded with a stimulus package more than twice as large as the one Bill Clinton briefly entertained at the start of 1993 but couldn’t get passed. — Robert B Reich, Salon

Keynesian economics 101: Say hello to that old ghost from the past we thought banished by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. It’s called “Keynesian Economics.” Ironically, even the brilliant John Maynard Keynes disowned it. After meeting with a group of Washington “Keynesians” in 1944, he said he was the only non-Keynesian in the room. His brainchild, government spending to stimulate demand, had been converted from its originally intended limited application to an all-purpose economic panacea by politicians, academics and journalists. — George Melloan, The Wall Street Journal