PRESIDENT CLINTON DENIES ACCUSING OBAMA CAMP OF PLAYING RACE CARD

President Clinton is denying that he accused Senator Obama’s camp of playing “the race card,” notwithstanding a tape recording of Mr. Clinton saying just that during an interview with a Philadelphia radio station on Monday. During that telephone interview, the former president was asked about his comments on the day of the South Carolina primary comparing Mr. Obama’s success to that of an earlier black presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson. “I think that they played the race card on me. And we now know, from memos from the campaign and everything, that they planned to do it all along,” Mr. Clinton told WHYY. “I was stating a fact, and it’s still a fact. … This was used out of context and twisted for political purposes by the Obama campaign to try to breed resentment elsewhere.”

Just after the interview ended, but before hanging up, Mr. Clinton can be heard saying, “I don’t think I should take any s– from anybody on that, do you?”

When an NBC reporter asked Mr. Clinton yesterday what he meant by claiming that Mr. Obama played the race card on him, Mr. Clinton replied: “No, no, no. That’s not what I said. You always follow me around and play these little games, and I’m not going to play your games today. … You have mischaracterized it to get another cheap story to divert the American people from the real urgent issues before us, and I choose not to play your game today. Have a nice day.”

Mr. Clinton added that he spoke with Mr. Jackson, who was not offended by the comments. Mr. Obama and his campaign said they did not know what memos Mr. Clinton was referencing. “I have no idea what he meant,” the senator told reporters.

McCAIN WARNS OF PROTECTIONISM’S SIREN SONG

Speaking at an all-but-shuttered factory yesterday in Youngstown, Ohio, Senator McCain warned struggling American manufacturing workers not to succumb to the “siren song of protectionism,” McClatchy Newspapers reported.

The presumptive Republican nominee told workers they have to adapt to the new economic era. “I think the adjustment is not to erect barriers and protectionism. I think the answer is to understand that free trade or not, we are in an information technology revolution,” he said, according to McClatchy. “We’ve got to be part of that new economy rather than trying to cling to an old economy.”

CONSERVATIVE GROUP ATTACKS OBAMA ON DEATH PENALTY VOTE

The producer of the “Willie Horton” ad that helped defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, Floyd Brown, released a Web video yesterday slamming Senator Obama for his 2001 vote as an Illinois lawmaker against expanding the death penalty to cover gang-related murders. “When the time came to get tough, Obama chose to be weak. … Can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?” the video asks. Mr. Brown told Time magazine that a political action committee, the National Campaign Fund, would put the ad on TV in North Carolina this week, but funds were still being solicited. The group’s Web site misspells Mr. Obama’s first name, mentions his middle name, Hussein, and casts him as “a liberal, only slightly more stylish than Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, but equally dedicated to the same causes.”

“Floyd Brown and the garbage he puts on TV represent everything the American people hate about politics, and we look forward to John McCain denouncing this shameful effort to boost his candidacy using Willie Horton ads,” a spokesman for Mr. Obama, William Burton, said.

“NAZI SKINHEADS FOR McCAIN” REGISTERS WITH IRS

A political group that registered last week with the Internal Revenue Service, “Nazi Skinheads for McCain 2008,” is aimed at skewering the presumptive Republican nominee, not backing him, an organizer said yesterday. “I’m not a Nazi skinhead. I’m not a McCain supporter, either,” an unemployed software designer from Jacksonville, Fla., Kier O’Neil, told The New York Sun. “I’m kind of a disaffected Republican. I would rather have pretty much anybody in office than to have a Republican back in office.” The group’s registration as a so-called 527 organization was submitted in the name of Mr. O’Neil’s alter ego, “Hans Spectre, Minister of Propaganda.”