IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign,
back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious
presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack
Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.
Barry Blitt
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich
Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let
alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked
America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael
Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service
detail
earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.
“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama
reassured
his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing
in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud
burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a
start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear
receded.
Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “
Treason!” and “
Terrorist!” and “
Kill him!” and “
Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited
slinging of racial epithets,
are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every
conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.
All’s
fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring
up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is
minor,
even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s
childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have
collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s
not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however
spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many
mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain
campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the
Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.
What makes them
different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin
rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not
exclusively)
by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “
palling around with terrorists”
(note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way
you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote,
Palin
slurs him as an enemy of American troops.
By the time McCain
asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that
someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the
repeated invocation
of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at
these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the
poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of
terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic
threats of today.
That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of
being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as
a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack
Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how
a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.
We
all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential
murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know
how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law
into their own hands.
Obama can hardly be held accountable for
Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to
take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in
2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose
inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and
strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a
crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he
expressed concern last week
that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the
United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn
that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.
It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he
loudly disassociated himself
from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him
at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma
expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release
boilerplate disavowals
after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week
when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin
rally
while in full uniform.
From
the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions
about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to
prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And,
will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first
question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the
second: Yes.
McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate
strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the
Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s
mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had
recruited as a Palin handler
none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had
worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle
where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by
vicious racist rumors.
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.”
This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a
potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s
astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the
McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis
Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.
The operatives who
would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key
indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign
ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather
than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama
(or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose
a former Fannie executive who had
no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.
There
are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these
tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator
or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can
repeatedly
declare
that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering
how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic
populations are each roughly
one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was
mistakenly ejected
by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August,
even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his
credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of
place.
Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve
long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and
liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in
the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that
Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not
energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a
reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a
campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are
as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.
To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year —
the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer
reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as
Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is
a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is
looking like a goner.
But
we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final
say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain
campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and
inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on
the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit
bulls and otherwise.
More Articles in
Opinion »
A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2008, on page WK10 of the New York edition.
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon (PA)
