Advance publicity for Game Change, the new book by John Heileman and Mark Halperin about the 2008 presidential race, brought with it a furor about some reportedly "outrageous" racial remarks Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apparently made about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. 

For people interested in the category of race, these have been an interesting couple of weeks. The summer that began with Henry Louis Gates’s arrest on suspicion of being an intruder in his own Cambridge home wound down with Joe Wilson’s “you lie” outburst and subsequent apotheosis as the truth-telling face of a can’t take-it-no-more far right.