Anti-McCain Hysterics

The news has traveled well beyond the borders of blogland that McCain-Palin rallies might as well carry Wasilla uber alles banners for all the whipped-up participants at these gatherings who have called for the assassination of Barack Obama. Sarah Palin has since been compared to George Wallace for supposedly encouraging the bigots and rednecks and would-be James Earl Rays who hang upon her every word and share in her resentment of East Coast cosmopolitanism. (Can she plead that she was only an infant when Wallace ran for president as a segregationist, or does the fact that he later regretted his wicked behavior complicate her exoneration?) Meanwhile, her running-mate’s hoary labeling of Obama’s tax plan as "socialism" (a badge to be worn proudly, if you ask me) is evidently code for "beware the dangerous Negro," at least according to one columnist for the Kansas City Star who doesn’t know that Paul Robeson was a Stalinist who tried to have real socialists imprisoned under the Smith Act.

Also this week, the New Yorker, ever ready to atone for its ill-received satiric cover of the Obamas, writes that the average GOP campaign stop a mere fortnight before Election Day carries a mood "not so much socialist as national-socialist." Lines like that always put me in mind of the era when the New Yorker was considered a middlebrow publication. It certainly picked a lousy time to invoke fascism, as one visible exponent of the real thing, Jorg Haider, just gave up the ghost in his native Austria in a headline-making car wreck. Surely that qualifies as talk of the town for urbane blue staters with tyrannical demagogues on the brain.

Given Obama’s ever expanding lead in the polls, one would think his defenders — or opponents of his rival, anyway — would be confident enough to do the lazy intellectual and moral work of not resorting to histrionics and sub-Orwellian political cliches to close the deal.

It would be rather alarming if there was a phalanx of willing executioners marching in lockstep behind the GOP nominee, wouldn’t it? The only problem with this well-trafficked conceit is that the reporting it’s based on isn’t quite true. Here’s John Leo at the Huffington Post, remarking on how the mainstream press has been gobbling up one bogus item about a now-notorious Palin rally held the other week in Clearwater, Florida:

[S]omeone shouted "Kill him!" referring to the 60s bomber Bill Ayers, and a man shouted a racial slur at a network sound man (apparently the N-word), adding "sit down, boy."

These two shouts were clearly over the line. But do two extremist shouts from a crowd of 4,500 people establish the rally as a far-right hate fest? Not really. Florida reporters at the Palin speech did not detect a wave of racism and rage. Their coverage was routine, discovering no incipient fascism. William March of the Tampa Tribune, who was there, told me: "They booed Obama and the press, but that just makes it a normal Republican rally." Two odd things happened at the hands of bloggers and pundits. The "Kill him!" line, directed toward Ayers was presented as a threat to assassinate Obama. And the single racist remark cited by Millbank became one of many racist remarks at the rally. A New York Times editorial made this same mistake, turning one racial comment into many.’

I remember reading somewhere that it was disingenuous to equate the antiwar movement in 2003 with its more colorful caricatures — the "Bush = Hitler" lot, the ZOG-minded Israel-bashers, and the open backers of Saddam Hussein, who in fact helped organize some of the antiwar rallies under the activist heading of International ANSWER. (This low tactic of smearing an adversary by the fringe company he may unwillingly keep is one of the subjects of Eric Alterman’s new book, Why We’re Liberals.) But despite the fact that McCain wants nothing to do with the nasty people ready to vote for him, it’s suggested or implied that he deliberately galvanizes their worst impulses.

As for the caricature McCain proudly aligns himself with, Palin has stoked the fires of a kulturkampf, it’s true. But her rhetoric is in no way extraordinary or out of tune with decades-old movement conservative gripes about the virtues of the small town over the vices of Babylon. I find this talk stupid and tiresome myself, but how far a descent is it into the depths of populism to say that there are really two Americas? Palin is John Edwards run through the Hudson Institute.

Saul Bellow, in his brilliant satire Herzog, called this type of appeal to the folksy and provincial element "low-grade universal potato love." It’s why, wrote Herzog in one of his feverish fantasy letters to Adlai Stevenson, Gen. Eisenhower won his election. Fat chance of it helping this time out, so can we cool it with the Nazi talk already?

One has by now seen the footage of McCain telling some old witch "No, ma’am" after she claimed that Obama was an Arab. Good. To this should also be added the following video, showing that there are indeed wingnuts and baleful conspiracists haunting McCain-Palin affairs. However, given the chance to confront them, official campaign spokesmen, and even supporters who do fancy a culture war, unfailingly do.

How nice, by the way, that a Kurdish Muslim gets paid to work for the Republican nominee in these post-racial times of ours.