TOM BRUNE, Newsday
- Now that Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination, Republican John McCain faces the unprecedented, and tricky, task of building a campaign against the first black presidential candidate of a major party in a general election campaign.
A key test may come in how McCain and groups supporting him treat Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and his incendiary comments as a campaign issue, something the Obama and McCain campaigns have skirmished over.
But if McCain needs a reminder that race still is the third rail of American politics, he need not to look beyond the 2006 campaign for Massachusetts governor.
