McCain: The Red Herring Campaign

Let’s demonize Barack Obama. Let’s demonize the media. Let’s turn Obama into the boogeyman. Let’s play up every rotten little stereotype that we can to scare the living daylights out of people with. Let’s say he’ll raise your taxes until we’re blue in the face. Oh, and let’s say he’s connected to terrorists, even hangs around with them, and oh yes, let’s question whether he’s even funded by foreigners who may just be terrorists.

I’m certain that these very conversations and suggestions took place in the past few months in McCain campaign strategy meetings. But like seemingly every attack that’s come from the McCain-Palin camp, they are lacking in one key ingredient to make them have the kind of impact that John McCain and his crew wishes they’d have…substance. But with a campaign that is now featuring only negative and attack television ads and with a strategy to send Sarah Palin out to stir up her crowds with the most scurrilous and vicious references and innuendo, the McCain campaign has determined that character assassination and outright fear-mongering are all they have left if they wish to influence the electorate enough to vote for them.

It reminds me of what happens during a riot. There is an announcement of a gathering at City Hall. A couple of hundred well-meaning people gather to listen to the speaker, who is standing at the foot of the steps behind a podium. The speaker tells the crowd that the government is corrupt, that the media has taken the side of the corporations and against them, the people, and as the rhetoric escalates, the crowd becomes more and more riled up, and begins to swell with more activists and people who live in the streets and are hearing the speaker’s message loud and clear.

When the speaker is done, most of the original crowd disperses to go home to their families and back to where they came from, but some of the crowd isn’t done with the evening. They form an angry mob, turn over a couple of cars and light them on fire, smash windows as they walk down the street and generally destroy everything in their path as they fan out across the unsuspecting city. Only when the police arrive in force do they dissipate and return to where they came from.

The speaker at the podium, reached for comment the next morning, registers surprise that the angry mob had come from his crowd the night before. He says that he didn’t incite them to riot, but that they acted on their own and that he had no idea that they’d do these unacceptable acts. Innocently, he tells the reporter that he just stood up there last night telling the crowd how he feels about the current situation and the crowd connected the dots and took matters into its own hands.

The other day when John McCain recognized that his crowds had gotten out of control, reacting to his rhetoric of fear, hate and terror and had begun to exhibit the signs of a stirred up mob that was now ready to riot and revolt, he faced a difficult decision. He either turned away with a wry smile and said to himself that it’s out of his hands, or he could have a gut-check soul searching moment and realize that he had created a monster that left unchecked, would be his legacy for the rest of this presidential campaign and for all time. He chose the latter, finally displaying a rare moment of sanity and realizing that it is his image that is emblazoned with this fear-mongering and politics of hate.

I don’t expect that the red herring style attacks of the McCain-Palin campaign are going to let up, because they just don’t have anything else to choose from. I do believe that their particular campaign will be studied in years to come and be the subject of documentaries and vignettes on the History Channel. But I believe that John McCain is now seeing the results of weeks of vicious attacks on Barack Obama. His low information voters are now certain that an Obama campaign will be tantamount to turning our country over to a terrorist supporting black man whose Muslim faith has taught him to only support people who don’t look and live like they do.

I think of Jackie Robinson, the black baseball star who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, who had to withstand the worst kind of attacks of hate and bigotry in order to persevere and become a star and a prominent player that would lead the way for other blacks to also become Major League baseball players. He overcame tremendous odds, and did it in the most classy way, just quietly doing his job and proving that he had every right to be there, just like every other Major Leaguer of his time. Barack Obama has had to be the Jackie Robinson of the political world. And while absorbing the most unfair, unsubstantiated and venomous attacks by McCain-Palin and most of the Right Wing punditry, he has withstood it, counteracted it with class and, like Jackie Robinson, will persevere and become our next president.

Barack Obama will forever break the presidential color barrier and will prevent a future black candidate’s opponent from turning to a McCain-style red herring using campaign for the purpose of character assassination, racial stereotype and innuendo. I am so unhappy to have to live through this very sad patch of history and to witness the kind of campaign that John McCain has chosen to run, but it has been a tremendously empowering source of pride to watch Barack handle it, hold his head high and show this country that he will just not allow himself and his campaign to be defined, trivialized and succumb to exactly what the McCain campaign wishes him to be.