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So here we go, 29 days to go, with the McCain campaign down an average of 8 points in the polls and the real mudslinging starts. Considering the general tenor of this election cycle, I have to wonder at my own words here, for the real mudslinging seems to have been ongoing for months. In my own party, the real fighting began with the results of the Iowa Caucus, when it became clear that all of our assumptions over the preceding year were not necessarily correct, and that Hillary Clinton might actually not be our nominee. While the Democratic party engaged in its quadrennial internecine bloodletting to find a nominee, confronting all the while its own personal demons of racism and sexism, the Republicans stood agog on the sidelines. Perhaps it was their own dissatisfaction with Senator McCain, their standard bearer after Super Tuesday. Perhaps it was their disbelief, that we would actually give them a black nominee with the middle name of Hussein as their opponent. Perhaps it was hoping against hope that they would still be allowed to vomit out nearly 20 years of hating Hillary Clinton onto their chosen victim.
Alas, it was not to be as they wished, and the McCain campaign has struggled for months. For while Barack Obama might, at first glance, seem an easy mark for their fanatical, racist base, Senator Obama has shown himself to be a shrewd campaigner, a canny debater, a quick thinker, and a voice of wisdom and deliberation in the midst of the current economic chaos. He has confronted the questions of racism, terror and national security head on, with a minimum of sound bytes and talking points, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, Obama has treated us like adults. After 8 years of condescension, obfuscation and outright lies, it seems that a large number of Americans find such treatment refreshing, and that refreshment is reflected in the polls.
Contrast that to the performance of the McCain campaign over the last several months. Senator McCain has shown himself to be erratic, unstable and unprepared for the current problems facing our nation. From his often contradictory statements regarding our economic situation, his antics involving the supposed “suspension” of his campaign to return to the Senate (for the first time since April) to work on the bailout, to his ill-considered statements regarding our relations with Russia, to his very pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, Senator McCain has shown himself to be a man who has lost the initiative, reeling from crisis to crisis without any clear vision of how to proceed on his own.
And so, facing the possibility of electoral ruin, Senator McCain’s campaign has finally fallen back on the last resort of scoundrels, no unlike Dr. Johnson I don’t mean patriotism, though that may be true in Britain, in America the last resort of scoundrels is to whip up a mob. The maxim works like this: If you cannot refute a person’s arguments, assasinate their character, if you cannot assasninate their character, embroil them in a scandal, if you cannot embroil them in a scandal, get them locked up, and if you can’t lock them up, lynch them.
It is a sad pattern, oft repeated across the swath of our history. Be it the legions of falsely accused African-American men murdered for decades in every region of our nation, the labor organizer, the woman who “does not know her place,” or any of the innumerable other victims of hatred in our nation whose only offense was their nonconformity, and unwillingness to shut up about it when ordered. The image of Sarah Palin, in her stylish white outfit, calling Obama a friend to “terrorists” and asserting that “he doesn’t see the America we do” while all the while smiling and winking at those in the crowd who hurl death threats and racial epithets from their slathering mouths, recalls to mind all that is horrid and awful of our past. The supposedly offended white woman, the mob, the wrongly accused black man, and the rope.
Not this time Governor, not again. We the people are tired of the garbage, we are tired of staining our hands with the blood of those whom the powers that be find threatening. This time the voice crying in the wilderness will not be stopped up by the beguilings of some Salome of the right. This election is a chance for our nation to exorcise some of our collective demons, I say let the cleansing begin. The only death that we are going to witness this campaign season is the Republican Party’s hopes of the Presidency.
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