Just a day after Obama elevated our national discourse on race with his historic speech, Republican strategists are already licking their chops and getting ready to drag us right back down into the gutter: (HT TPM)

Although Barack Obama's speech yesterday on race relations was generally received very well by the media, Jonathan Martin reports that GOP consultants still see the Jeremiah Wright controversy as ripe material for attacking Obama in the general election."You don't have to say that he's unpatriotic, you don't question his patriotism," said Chris LaCivita, the Republican strategist who helped create the Swift Boat Veterans ads in 2004. "Because I guaran-damn-tee you that with that footage you don't have to say it." "Obama knows that if somebody puts him in church on some day that Wright said some crazy [stuff] like white people injected blacks with AIDS he's in a world of hurt," said Rick Wilson, who made the 2002 ads tying then-Sen. Max Cleland, a disabled veteran, to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. "I would eat this up like cake."

Eduardo M. Peñalver is president of Seattle University. The views expressed in this piece are his own and do not represent the views of Seattle University.

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