JohnnyCeltics – what you’re seeing is simply a reflection of the losing candidate grasping at any straw which might help him recover in the polls. When the race was close, issues could be discussed, McCain could say, let’s keep this one above the belt. But when you have no original or good ideas to run on, when you have nothing to sell that anyone would want to buy, you can only overinflate what you’ve got so much before people start to peel back the curtain and see the little man pulling the levers.
McCain’s only path to victory (and make no mistake about it, McCain is driven by a desire to become President and is willing to do just about anything to get there) is to tear down his opponent. That strategy is as old as politics itself…if you can’t make the voters like you, make them fear your opponent. That’s what swift boating was about 4 years ago. That’s what Willie Horton was about. That’s what the infamous Daisy ad was about. If you can’t win on policy, fear is the next best thing.
So, when you are making the electorate fear someone who also happens to be black, with an exotic name, you don’t really have to specifically even mention race, and it will just automatically go there. A savvy politician would take great pains to make sure that the fear they were building about their opponent would not generate into racial distrust. If you saw how Clinton conducted her campaign against Obama, say what you will about her, but she threw the kitchen sink at Obama, but managed to keep it by and large not about race until the very end when she made her hard working (white) Americans in Appalaicha argument. She was adept at keeping race out of the discussion in part because it was also a defensive position. Essentially, had she made the contest a referendum on race, the next shoe to drop would have been gender, and she already had a hard enough time fighting back the forces of sexism without having to confront it head on.
McCain has no such worries. He’s the rich old white man from a priveledged background that the major parties always force down our throats. The only -ism he has to worry about is ageism, and as long as he’s younger than Reagan, it’s far less of a handicap than being black in a Presidential campaign…there IS precedent unlike for Obama.
Essentially McCain needed to adopt an emergency strategy, because the first five he pulled out were not working, he placed a bet that fear would trump hope. And the fear he’s most familiar with, the fear that resonates with his base, is fear of the unknown…the fear of “otherness”. If you read that one article I posted, you know all about that fear. Unfortunately, “otherness” for a black candidate might as well be “blackness”.
One interesting aside I’ll leave you with here. The next time you see or hear a story about what’s going on out there on the campaign trail, and they play a clip of McCain going after Obama at a rally, and then a clip of Obama going after McCain at a rally, or vice versa, listen to the crowd reaction. When McCain says that Obama will raise your taxes, the crowd erupts in BOOOOOOOO’s. When Obama says that McCain had not managed to come up with a single idea as to how to move this economy forward/how to differentiate himself from Bush, his crows CHEERS! Both negative attacks against their opponents…COMPLETELY different reactions. That is systematic, that is the difference you get when you run one campaign that targets fear and another that targets issues.
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