Losing is never easy, especially in politics. It means the public just didn’t buy what you were selling, always a bitter pill.

I have swallowed that pill often. Other Americans vetoed my votes for Gerald Ford, Bob Dole and John McCain. My wishes for a flat tax and Social Security privatization haven’t exactly panned out. It happens.

But sometimes losing in the political arena brings out the lowest depths of behavior. This sad fact is on display now in the form of the slanderous mischaracterization of President Barack Obama’s critics.

Even before his election, there was speculation of how much negative reaction there might be to his ascendancy – and how much might be based on bigotry. Fair enough. It remains an intriguing question: What effect will a black president have on racism, and what effect will racism have on a black president?

But as soon as the Obama agenda met opposition, presumptions arose about racist motives.

Let’s stipulate that among Obama’s detractors are some folks who just don’t like black people. That’s self-evident. But it is a reckless leap to assert that his skin color is a major driving force behind the political challenges he faces.

I first heard this from black scholars and activists with an obvious agenda of painting America as far more racist than it is. No one should underestimate the prevalence of racism in today’s America, but neither should it be overstated to propel a political agenda.

Guilt-ridden whites on the left soon joined the chorus, realizing this was a handy device to discredit conservatism as racially tinged.

When the president’s health care plan met strong opposition from town halls to tea parties, its advocates stooped first to insulting denial, asserting that the outpouring was not mainstream passion but some peculiar product of fringe paranoia. And that was only the beginning.

As it became clear that the number of Americans objecting not just to Obamacare but to other Democratic big-government urges was growing, guardians of that agenda brought out the big guns: It’s because he’s black.

The falseness of this ploy is exceeded only by its gutlessness. The last debate tactic of the scoundrel is to falsely wave off the opponent as unworthy of engagement. Tar the opposition as racists, and they don’t even deserve a place at the table of rational debate.

Jimmy Carter famously gave in to that temptation, joined by pundits like Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, who invented from thin air a racial motive for Rep. Joe Wilson’s infamous outburst as she sought to dismiss anti-Obama sentiment as bigotry-driven.

Anyone stupid enough to buy that argument is saddled with the belief that the Americans who have recoiled from the notions of socialized medicine, government-run banks and auto companies and trillion-dollar debt would have embraced such outrages if only they had come from a white president.

In a nation where black America loves Ted Kennedy and white conservatives love Clarence Thomas, it has long been clear that politics dwarfed race long ago.

Perhaps sensing that the race-baiting was not succeeding, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now seeks to ramp up the calumny with her forlorn recollections of the 1978 killings of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco, seeing a similarly murderous flavor in the tone of opposition to Obama.

Shame on her and anyone engaging in this contemptible behavior. Whether it is exaggerating the prevalence of racism to explain the president’s troubles or using a few admittedly unhinged critics to smear the opposition as assassins-in-waiting, these are the tactics of desperate souls.

It’s curious, considering the one-party rule they currently enjoy. Even when these people are on top, nothing is beneath them.

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