It certainly seems apropos. As John McCain's poll numbers -- both nationally and in state by battleground state -- continue to fall, his surrogates spent Saturday 'leaking' to the MSM that the campaign was about to pivot to a new wave of attack ads.
Hoping to revive the same scandals Hillary Clinton hoped would derail the Obama campaign, McCain is dusting off the tried-and-true strategies of guilt by association and character assassination. In layman's terms, this means we'll be hearing names like William Ayers, Tony Rezko and Jeremiah Wright a lot in the coming weeks.
This has worked wonders for the Rove-orchestrated presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004. Indeed, McCain's campaign is now run by the same men who torpedoed his candidacy in 2000 (when he arguably was a Maverick™) by circulating rumors ahead of the South Carolina primary that McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually his illegitmate black love-child. It worked wonders when a GOP 527 'swift-boated' John Kerry in 2004.
Maybe the folks in the McCain bunker haven't figured it out yet, but Barack Obama is not Al Gore and he's not John Kerry.
In fact, it seems like Team McCain didn't put much stock in a comment Obama made in Philadelphia in January about exactly how he would deal with Republican efforts to smear him the way they did his two predecessors:
Mobster wisdom tells us never to bring a knife to a gun fight. But what does political wisdom say about bringing a gun to a knife fight?
That’s exactly what Barack Obama said he would do to counter Republican attacks “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night. [...] Obama made the comment in the context of warning donors that the general election campaign against McCain could get ugly. “They’re going to try to scare people. They’re going to try to say that ‘that Obama is a scary guy....’”
And indeed, this is the message coming from McCain. With nothing left to run on, he's now stuck running against Obama. It's unclear why they thought it would be a good idea to announce the plan to start stabbing at Obama, but Obama seems to have wasted no time loading up the gun. The Obama campaign's first counter-strike was a shot across the bow in the form of this ad, which was released yesterday:
When that didn't work, Obama put away the handgun and pulled out the Howitzer.
While a part of me is relieved to see a Democratic presidential candidate 'fighting back', I have to say, the capacity of some Americans to hate a black man named (say it with me...) Barack Hussein Obama terrifies me.
The easiest way to 'attack' Obama's character is to make him the Other. The easiest way to do this is to use his name and his race to call his patriotism and his Americanness into question. At the rally in Clearwater this weekend, Sarah Palin showed us how it's done.
"I was reading my copy of the New York Times the other day," she said."Booooo!" replied the crowd.
"I knew you guys would react that way, okay," she continued. "So I was reading the New York Times and I was really interested to read about Barack's friends from Chicago."
It was time to revive the allegation, made over the weekend, that Obama "pals around" with terrorists, in this case Bill Ayers, late of the Weather Underground. Many independent observers say Palin's allegations are a stretch; Obama served on a Chicago charitable board with Ayers, now an education professor, and has condemned his past activities. [...]
"And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" she continued.
"Boooo!" the crowd repeated.
"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.
Palin went on to say that "Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers's living room, and they've worked together on various projects in Chicago." Here, Palin began to connect the dots. "These are the same guys who think that patriotism is paying higher taxes -- remember that's what Joe Biden had said. "And" -- she paused and sighed -- "I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America, as the greatest force for good in the world. I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as 'imperfect enough' to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country."
Did you catch it? GOP cheerleaders have been clamoring for McCain to "let Palin be Palin," and 24 hours into it, someone actually screamed "Kill him!" at a political rally. Admittedly, there's a 50-50 chance he was referring to Ayers, but seriously... "kill him!" KILL HIM!
At his rally in Albuquerque, NM today, McCain led off with a question for the audience: "Who is the real Barack Obama?" Listen carefully, and you'll hear the first and loudest voice offer his opinion: "Terrorist!"
For anyone who wonders why race is always an issue in this campaign, the examples above could hardly make it plainer. And things like this have been happening every week for the past few months, they just don't make it into the national spotlight very often.
The same kind of xenophobia was behind the recent attack on a mosque in Daytona, Ohio, where Muslim children were gassed while evening prayers during the holy month of Ramadan. Although local police would not rule the incident a hate crime, one member of the mosque pointed out that Daytona was one of many communities in the battleground state of Ohio that had recently been inundated with a DVD called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West; a group that supports John McCain mailed over 28 million DVDs to voters throughout the midwest.
It happened in Newberg, Oregon two weeks ago. According to public safety records at George Fox University, a Christian university, at 7:23 on September 23, a cardboard effigy of Barack Obama was found hanging from a tree with fishing wire around the cut-out's neck. Lest anyone mistake it for anything other than what it was — an act of racial hatred — the four students who admitted to hanging the effigy taped a sign to the figure's chest that identified Senator Obama as an "Act Six Reject". Act Six is a program similar to the Posse Foundation, in which Wheaton participates, and seeks to make liberal arts education more accessible to non-white and low-income students.
At the end of the day, John McCain and Sarah Palin aren't just "going negative," they're beginning to flirt with inciting violence on a presidential candidate who, at least as of today, seems very likely to become the next President of the United States. But no matter what brand of racial invective they sling, McCain and Palin will remain -- in the eyes of (far too) many Americans -- two All-American Mavericks™. Barack Hussein Obama, meanwhile, well, take it away citizens...
3 comments:
I think you are conflating supporters of the McCain campaign, various tangential news stories,not to mention drunken Hillary supporting bigots, with the campaign itself. It seems to me that the past associations of a presidential candidate, especially one with so paltry a record, would be fair game. If McCain had started his political career in the home of an unrepentant abortion clinic bomber I think we all would have found that somewhat germane.
Also, if you want to look for threats to public figures, you generally need go no further then the DailyKos Message board: http://michellemalkin.com/2007/02/27/assassination-chic-cheney-edition/
Okay, I'll take bait.
I'm not really conflating these various groups so much as accusing the strategists in the McCain campaign of deliberately stoking animosity that is grounded in xenophobia and racial ignorance.
I don't find the comparison to left-wing bloggers making light of Cheney's well-being in Afghanistan to right-wing shouts of "kill him," "treason" and "terrorist" a convincing one for several reasons. For now, though, I'll mention the one I feel is the most important:
Cheney is not a black man, much less the first black person the U.S. electorate has been so close to electing to the presidency. Don't get me wrong, I don't think one should wish violence on anyone. But I do think that to ignore, or worse, defend the McCain campaign's decision to blithely liken Obama to 'terrorists' requires a view of the history of race in America so narrow as to border on blindness.
As for the notion that Ayers is an unrepentant domestic terrorist, correct me if I'm wrong, but (a) he was never convicted of any criminal activity; (b) his membership in the Weather Underground occurred during Obama's childhood, long enough in the past that (c) the same board that Obama sat on with him included a number of Republican community leaders who seemed to have no trouble 'palling around' with this man.
That said, if folks in McCain's campaign want to talk about where one's political career was launched, I suspect it might be worth thinking about how Cindy McCain's family helped secure a Congressional seat for McCain, and what role that may have played in his decision to marry her even before his divorce form his first wife had been finalized. After all, it was Cindy Hensley McCain -- flush with the family beer fortune -- who bought McCain his house in Phoenix that allowed him to first establish residency in the Arizona, while her father bankrolled his campaign.
All to say, the origins of McCain's political career have about as much to do with his presidential campaign as Obama's absurdly overstated and short-lived contact with Ayers -- i.e., not much.
Nice rebuttal!! How is it that the demonizing, irrelevant past experiences that come up to supposedly disqualify the integrity and ideas of a candidate are thrown out by the Republican party, but most often never mentioned by Democrats except on far-reaching blogs and beatnik cafes? Astounds me sometimes... seeing that so many people are "hooked" on these stories. Part of me applauds the fact that the "scum stories" are less present in Dem politiking, but sometimes it makes my blood boil if another "swift-boat" phenomenon could affect this election.
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