... which came through today in Minnesota. The tone of his audience towards Barack Obama was past bitter and hateful. It bordered on scary, and this was one of the milder crowds in recent days. John McCain apparently had enough of the hate that his audiences were spewing and called on them to show some respect. He was booed. By his own supporters.
So, I give McCain credit for trying to call off the crazies. But he is responsible to no small extent for sparking the madness in the first place. McCain did authorize the "Obama hangs out with terrorists" line that Sarah Palin has been using. He did promise a speaker at one of his townhalls that he would step up the attacks on Obama's character.
Someone once wrote about Al Gore that he really didn't like the slash and burn campaigning he found himself doing in 2000. As a result he didn't have a good sense of when he went too far. Sort of like a kid who never eats spinach, he doesn't know when he has a mouthful of rancid leaf because it is never "supposed" to taste good anyway. I think John McCain shares the same attribute. Because he doesn't like or approve of the character assassination his campaign has indulged in, he doesn't know when they have gone too far. Until yesterday when someone yelled "kill him!" when Obama's name was mentioned, and McCain's face registered shock.
I think there is another "thing" in play. John McCain has likely never seen race hatred in full flower. Few white Americans have actually. Make no mistake, many of the people who call Obama an Arab, or a Terrorist, or a Muslim, or a Socialist really are calling him a N*****. They are just too "polite" to do so in front of a TV camera. I believe that John McCain, when he decided to use the Karl Rove/Swifties playbook, didn't realize how race hatred would combine with those already vicious tactics to form a truly explosive mixture of hatred and violence.
John McCain now realizes what he and his running mate have unleashed. You could see it in his face today and yesterday. I hope he can put this evil genie back in the bottle. If not I hope the Secret Service is working overtime.
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I would more likely assume that McCain has, in fact, seen "race hatred in full flower," rather than not. Remember, he was born and bred in the US NAVY, the lagging service in the area of civil rights (for blacks). The family settled into northern Virginia in 1951. There was some fairly virulent racism still flourishing in that State, even the northern regions, in those days. He was moving through Annapolis in the mid-50's. I would suspect overt racism was not un-common. (This was certainly the case at my Service Academy a decade later) I would give Mr. McCain appropriate benefit of the doubt. But, unless he darted from phone booth to phone booth in his first two decades, the above bio leads me to assume it was very likely that he had seen overt, perhaps even rabbid racism "up close and personal." I make no assumptions about the extent of his participation. Perhaps he always stood up AGAINST it. But unlikely, since I know that such "standing up against" things did not sit well among such groups as fighter pilots in those days. And all accounts portray him as a "leader of the pack" and the life of the party......including at Annapolis, where he finished FIFTH FROM LAST in his class of nearly 900.
John McCain certainly "saw" racism, but never from the receiving end, and likely not often in its more virulent forms. The politer societies that McCain grew up in didn't deal with the sort of folks that actually lynched people. Thus, they took comfort that they weren't racists because they didn't do the sort of things those racists did.
Because racist incidents don't feature in his autobiography I doubt he saw anything that was really seared in his mind.
So, my point is that he has a blind spot -- which I suspect most white Americans share -- and doesn't realize that the sort of tactics used against him in 2000 and against John Kerry in 2004 go from despicable to very scary when used against Barack Obama this year; simply because of the race tinderbox.
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