EDITORIALS
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Crawling into the gutter
socialistworker.org/2008/08/05/crawling-into-the-gutter

John McCain is turning on the slime machine because he and his staff have concluded they can't win any other way.

August 5, 2008

YOU'VE SEEN it dozens of times in movies--the crook commits the crime, then turns around and says he saw the guy who done it, and...he went that-away!

Now, it's John McCain's latest strategy in the 2008 presidential election--with his claim that Barack Obama was the first to inject the "race card" into the campaign.

No one could really be surprised that John McCain--his high-minded talk aside--would climb down into the sewer. After all, he's the presidential candidate of the party that spawned Karl Rove. The only question was how much of the dirty work McCain and his campaign staff would do themselves, and how much they'd leave to blowhards like Rush Limbaugh on right-wing hate radio.

But the other factors to recognize in all this are the lack of a tough response from Obama and the Democrats--and the willing connivance of the "impartial" U.S. media in repeating McCain's veiled and not-so-veiled appeals to racism.

At least New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was frank about what the Republicans are up to:

“Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as ‘the American president Americans have been waiting for.’

“There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American, but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us--the "us" being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.”

Emphasis on "red-white-and-blue Americans."

Last month, Obama was denounced in a McCain ad for allegedly passing up a visit to a military hospital in Germany to meet with wounded soldiers (reportedly, the McCain campaign had another ad in the can to run if Obama made the trip, which would have accused him of exploiting wounded soldiers for a photo op).

The absurdity of the charge came in the footage the Republicans used in their commercial--of Obama sinking a three-point basket...in front of U.S. troops. But even in that choice of imagery, there was more than meets the eye. "Consider this," wrote John Heilemann in New York magazine. "Would the ad have featured footage of Obama on a golf course draining a hole-in-one? 'No, it wouldn't,' laughs a GOP media savant. 'The racial angle is the first thing I thought of when I saw that ad. It fits into the celebrity stuff, too.'"

The "celebrity stuff" was spewed into the airwaves last week in the form of another attack ad--using footage of two white women, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, with no conceivable relationship to Obama (in fact, the Hilton family are McCain supporters)--depicting Obama as a shallow fame-seeker.

"The Republican National Committee targeted [Tennessee Democrat] Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee," Herbert wrote. "The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, 'Harold, call me.'"

Then, to top it off, who gets accused of "injecting" race into the campaign? Obama.
How so? At a campaign appearance in an almost all-white county in Missouri, Obama said, "What they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills."

McCain and the Republicans have been complaining ever since that Obama was playing the "race card"--having done so themselves for their own purposes, while loudly denying they did any such thing.

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HOW MANY people will swallow this garbage is another question. U.S. society has changed since the Republicans' 1980s rise to dominance in Washington, with Ronald Reagan and Co. finding new ways to exploit racism in mainstream politics. Opinion polls show that the number of U.S. voters who say they won't vote for an African American for president has dropped to single digits.

But when racism goes unchallenged, it festers. And Obama has been determined to avoid discussing this very issue from the beginning of the campaign--to the frustration of many African Americans who look with hope to his candidacy.

On the contrary, Obama has instead repeated the same themes about "personal responsibility," particularly of Black men, that served the Republicans in the past by deflecting attention from the social causes of the crisis of the Black community.

McCain is turning on the slime machine because he can't win any other way. He can't separate himself from George Bush, whose popularity ratings have dropped to Richard Nixon levels. The parade of top Republicans exposed as crooked hypocrites continues.

And worst of all, the economy is stuck in one of the worst slumps since the Great Depression, with more suffering to come. Three different studies that focus on the impact of the economy on elections--and which have a track record in predicting the winner in presidential elections--show Obama scoring a solid win.

McCain and his campaign team--now headed by Steve Schmidt, best known as the chief assistant to Karl Rove in the sleazy 2004 campaign to get George Bush back into the White House--are counting on fear-mongering, and the hope that Obama will wilt under the pressure.

"They've concluded, in other words," wrote Heilemann, "that even if McCain may not be able to win the election in any affirmative sense, he might still wind up behind the big desk if he and his people can strip the bark off Obama with sufficiently vicious force.

It's still a long shot. The election remains Obama's to lose--as the U.S. business establishment has concluded, to judge from the corporate contributions flowing to the Democrats.

But just as when Hillary Clinton's campaign took the low road in the Democratic primaries, Obama hasn't called out his opponents for their sleaze--nor on any of the many other issues where the Republicans are vulnerable--and that leaves an opening to peel away support.

U.S. politics could use an honest discussion about race and the effects of centuries of systematic injustice on African Americans and on all of American society--and it's hard to imagine a time when the population as a whole was more ready for such a discussion. But unless something changes dramatically, it won't happen in this election--and two-party system will continue to serve up fears and fraud in place of the facts about race.

Those who care about opposing injustice need to challenge the sleazy racist message of the Republicans, wherever and however it emerges--while taking up the real issues that Obama and the Democrats want to avoid.