With two weeks to go and things not looking so good for him, John McCain is starting to drop all pretense of dignity. He begins to remind me of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. His obsession for the possession his "precious" having completely taken over his very being, the once-attractive hobbit has been reduced to a frantic, grasping, selfish, fiend, consumed by his ambition and willing to do or say anything to get what he wants.
Long gone is the McCain of this summer who called for a respectful campaign on the issues. Just a distant memory is the "straight talker" of 2000, who was broken and destroyed by the Rove slime machine that year. Now the Rove acolytes work for Mr. McCain, and more and more of his message seems to emanate from their minds.
His campaign has degenerated into an exercise in name-calling, labelling, guilt by association, division and coded race-baiting. Obama is called a "terrorist" at Republican rallies. McCain himself now raises the bogeyman of "socialism" when discussing his rival and styles his tax policy as "welfare" and "class warfare." His warmup speakers have taken to emphasizing Obama's Arab-sounding middle name.
Sarah Palin styles heavy concentrations of their supporters the "pro-American" parts of the country and states leaning Obama's way as the "anti-American" parts. In scenes redolent of McCarthyism, their surrogates such as Representative Bachman go on national television to demand Congressional investigations of the loyalty of Democratic politicians. Their spokesmen such as Tom Ridge follow up with network interviews reiterating the "socialist road" mantra while Palin glorifies of "small-town real Americans" while sowing resentment and suspicion of Americans who live in more urban settings, a coded reference to racial division. This is the kind of campaign Colin Powell had in mind when he referred to the McCain-Palin effort as "demagoguery."
Quite apart from the issue differences, which are hardly the focus of this strategy, it would be a very good thing for the country for this campaign to fail. For one, its defeat might make others in the future less likely. Beyond that, its division of the nation into "we and they" feeds the kind of furious partisan division which would make governing extremely difficult for either party. Perhaps most ominous from what we are hearing at Republican rallies, it appears to be stoking the kind of passionate anger likely to lead to violence, either of American against American or against the candidate.
Obama constantly points out the destructive nature of this type of hate and fear mongering to the fabric of the nation. He also frequently asserts, "It will not work, not this time." He is most assuredly right on the first count, and one can only hope on the second as well.
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