There has been a lot of talk lately about the hostility to Barack Obama displayed by the crowds at rallies of John McCain and Sarah Palin. Indeed, some of the comments shouted by members of the audience have been very ugly at best, and, in some cases, borderline threatening.
It isn’t difficult to imagine why this is happening. McCain is substantially behind in the polls, and his supporters surely are aware of the long odds they now face with the election drawing ever nearer. A dying bull kicks the hardest, and the McCain campaign’s lackluster performance is causing its surrogates to resort to more extreme measures to try and even the field.
I don’t know the degree to which the most extreme of these shouted comments reflect the opinions of the average McCain supporter. The words “traitor” and “terrorist” are two of the more outrageous examples. I know that McCain himself was caught off guard in one instance, because you can see in the replay that he immediately recoiled. I don’t know if the same can be said for Sarah Palin at her rallies. I think she is naturally a more divisive figure. Perhaps the majority of McCain’s supporters are offended by the notion of someone accusing a sitting United States senator of treason. That’s a capital crime, after all, and no reasonable person, however conservative in ideology, has ever suggested that Senator Obama has ever betrayed the Constitution.
I am glad to see that Senator McCain is now correcting some of his supporters’ more absurd allegations and innuendo. He admonished some in a crowd recently by saying that Barack Obama is not someone that they should fear. That word, “fear”, is significant. I have heard McCain supporters recently saying that Obama “scares” them. I am very reluctant to attribute anyone’s opposition to Senator Obama to racism. But these comments seemed odd. It wasn’t “Obama’s proposals scare me”, as I might say “Bush’s foreign policy scares me”. And when you consider how many people are under the false impression that Senator Obama is Muslim, I cannot help but think that some of the people who say Obama “scares” them really aren’t misinformed.
And tonight I saw a woman addressing McCain at a campaign appearance. She was speaking into a microphone and said that she opposed Obama because “he’s an Arab”. McCain was again visibly disconcerted by this. To his credit, he corrected this woman, and again said that Senator Obama is a good American.
I am a little dissatisfied by some of the coverage of this I have been seeing at some of the websites I generally enjoy. Talking Points Memo has been hammering–a little too hard, I think–the McCain campaign on the trash talk. They have a point that the rhetoric has gone too far, and by saying nothing initially the campaign appeared to be tacitly condoning it. And while I do feel that Senator McCain has sunk a great deal in my esteem during this campaign, that is merely by virtue of his surrounding himself with advisers whom I consider sleazy. I appreciate that he’s now trying to correct some of the misrepresentations of his supporters. I know that must seem like a great distraction. I don’t want him to win, but I can at least say that it is because I disagree with his politics, and not his personality.
UPDATE: As I wrote above, I think that Governor Palin has done more than McCain to fan the flames at rallies, and Frank Rich writes about that in his column today. One important excerpt that I feel goes to the heart of what I dislike about the whole McCain/Palin campaign:
No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”
I have no doubt that this text was inserted into her speech by some staffer who probably, like Ann Coulter, thinks Joseph McCarthy was right. It was probably even the same staffer who gave her the Ronald Reagan quote about losing freedom she used in the debate. She didn’t mention it then–because I doubt she knew–but that quote was from a speech Reagan made long before his presidency, when he was protesting social security. All this goes to show why I would not consider voting for John McCain. It isn’t because he is a bad person. It’s because, for all his mavrick-ness, he is still surrounded by people who do not represent the American ideals I treasure. I know John McCain isn’t some racist reactionary. But he has in his campaign people whom I do not trust. And if the Bush administration has taught us anything it is that when a president is surrounded by crooked or incompetent people, you get bad government. One of McCain’s economic advisors is Kevin Hassett, who wrote Dow 36,000, which argued that stocks aren’t as risky as pessimists would have us believe, and that the Dow would soon be at 36,000. Hassett also said around 2005 that there was no housing bubble, and people like Paul Krugman were just ignorant naysayers.
Nobody expects the president of the United States to be an expert on everything. That’s what the cabinet and advisors are for. But if McCain would appoint people like Hassett or Phil Graham to solve our problems, I have a pretty good sense that we’d be looking at another “Heck of a job, Brownie”-type scenario.