COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — With a black man and a woman on the presidential tickets of the two major parties this year, allegations of racism and sexism have been flying.

Yet scholars who are expert in both areas say the terms are frequently being applied more loosely than they should be — and sometimes with enough contortions of logic to make voters' heads spin.

Take this example: Ohio Republicans demanded an apology last week from Democrats who talked publicly about how Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's race might be discouraging support among the state's voters.

Gov. Ted Strickland, a former Hillary Clinton supporter now campaigning for Obama, told the Chillicothe Gazette: "There are good people who won't vote for Obama because he's a black man. I don't want people to vote against their own interests because of an unwillingness to vote for a black man."

In earlier media interviews, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Cleveland called race the contest's "elephant in the room."

The state GOP's deputy chairman, Kevin DeWine, described the statements as shameful slander in which Democrats had "smeared Ohio voters as 'racists.'" DeWine said Strickland, Brown and others who made such remarks should say they were sorry for "playing the race card" in such a manner.

Here's where the twist of logic comes in. The Democrats, according to the GOP, had somehow just played Obama's race to their advantage by admitting that it played to their disadvantage.

The concept of racism had successfully been interjected into a public debate where it had largely been absent, though no racism had been committed by Democrats, said University of Massachusetts philosophy professor and author Lawrence Blum, a specialist in race issues.

"If you accuse someone of being racist, it's not racism," he said. "It might be wrong. It might be ill-founded. It might be without any basis. But it's not racist."

Blum sees the motivation on both sides as political.

"I see it as a concerted strategy by the Republicans to help people feel comfortable with their racial discomfort, to subtly tell white people who are a little uncomfortable voting for a black person that that's OK," he said. "It sounds as if Strickland was trying to counteract that, and it was a risky calculation on his part, by saying, 'I know you're uncomfortable with this black guy, because I'm like you, I come from where you come from, but let me talk to you about this man."

Sexism hasn't proven itself nearly as risky a business.

Nearly every variety of question or statement about Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has been skewered as sexist somewhere on the Internet. That includes questions about her motherhood, her personality, and her looks, which might naturally earn the label, but also questions on her decision-making as governor of Alaska, her role in the firing from the state police of an ex-brother-in-law, and her knowledge of foreign affairs.

Both Cindy McCain, the wife of GOP presidential nominee John McCain, and first lady Laura Bush have told national news programs they believe Palin is the victim of sexism. (Cindy McCain, only moments after leveling the charge, laughed off the fact that conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh had called Palin a "babe.")

The twist of logic here, says Estelle Freedman, a professor of U.S. history at Stanford University, is that Palin's selection as the nominee could very well be viewed as sexist.

"Being selected as a nominee largely on the basis of your gender, rather than your qualifications for office, one should raise the question, is that sexist?" said Freedman. "You need to know would she have been selected were there not the pre-existing political context of Hillary Clinton and the mobilization of the women's vote."

Edward Morgan, a political science professor at LeHigh University, again sees sexism as a buzzword with a political purpose.

"I call it the politics of distraction. It's a way of framing the race to make the Republican candidates look like populists," he said. "At the convention, the emphasis was on Sarah Palin's family, her religion. That's what propelled her into the limelight. Then as soon as the media started digging into her background, it was deliberately attacked as sexist. I call it a brilliant but cynical strategy."

Sadly, all the political positioning has overshadowed frightening displays of true sexism and racism aimed at Palin and Obama, respectively.

Palin's image has been plastered on suggestive action figures, risque T-shirts and pornography on the Internet. A life-size cardboard effigy of Obama was found suspended from a tree branch at a small Christian university in Oregon on Wednesday.

"We live in a culture that has historically been deeply racist and sexist," Freedman said. "There have been huge changes since the civil rights and feminist movements, but there are residuals. It would be unrealistic to say that any of us has no racist or sexist impulses. I would hope the question of this campaign would be how do we address it?"

On the Net:

Obama: http://my.barackobama.com

McCain: http://www.johnmccain.com