Is Harold Ford Jr. right? Would the Republicans be running 90 second ads about William Ayers if Barack Obama were a white man? Is Jonathan Martin right that McCain would be accused of racism no matter what he did? I agree with Harold Ford Jr. to this degree…the Republicans would be running nasty, unfair attacks against any conceivable candidate. And I agree with Jonathan Martin to this degree…insofar as the attacks on Obama incorporate criticisms of his Semitic middle name and tie that to terrorism, McCain is going to be charged with using racist, or ethnic, attacks.
Here is what the attacks on Hillary Clinton would have looked like:
In 1999, the Clinton adminstration cravenly offered pardons to 16 hard-core, remorseless terrorists of the Puerto Rican terror group Armed Forces for National Liberation – the FALN. (Two of them rejected the deal.)
During the 1970s and ’80s, the FALN waged a war against the people of the United States that included 130 plus bombings. Their most heinous attack was the January 1975 lunchtime bombing of Fraunces Tavern here in New York City. It killed four people, including my father, Frank Connor, 33.
That charge has, by the way, much more substance than any connection between Barack Obama and former weatherman, William Ayers. But let’s stipulate that the two cases have a lot of surface similarity. Both cases involve an effort to suggest that the Democrat is soft on terrorism and has ties to actual domestic terrorists. The difference is that the charge against Hillary Clinton isn’t coupled with rhetoric about her middle name, or constant messages about how we don’t really know who Hillary Clinton is and where her true sympathies lie.
When you attack the Clintons for pardoning members of FALN, you are questioning their judgment, not their loyalties. The William Ayers ads cannot be taken in isolation, but must be seen in the larger context of the McCain-Palin strategy.
“They are trying to throw out these codes,” said Representative Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York.
“He’s ‘not one of us?’” Mr. Meeks said, referring to a comment Sarah Palin made at a campaign rally on Oct. 6 in Florida. “That’s racial. That’s fear. They know they can’t win on the issues, so the last resort they have is race and fear.”
“Racism is alive and well in this country, and McCain and Palin are trying to appeal to that and it’s unfortunate,” said Representative Ed Towns, also from New York.
I’d ask Jonathan Martin if he thinks a Florida audience would react to charges against Hillary Clinton that her husband pardoned FALN members by screaming ‘traitor’ and ‘kill her’? I don’t think that is very likely. And it’s not just me who thinks the McCain-Palin team is dangerously fanning racial hatred. Look at axis-of-evil speechwriter David Frum:
Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.
I’m not suggesting that we remit our opposition to a hypothetical President Obama. Only that an outgunned party will need to stay cool. A big part of Obama’s appeal is his self-command. It’s a genuinely impressive quality. Let’s emulate it. We’ll be needing it.
What Frum doesn’t mention is that ‘Those who press this Ayers line of attack’ are John McCain and Sarah Palin, and not some unhinged off-the-cuff underlings. It is McCain and Palin that have allowed themselves to be introduced at rallies by people spitting out ‘Hussein’ as an epithet. It’s Sarah Palin that said the following recently in Colorado.
“Our opponent,” Ms. Palin told donors in Englewood, Colo., “is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”
She added, “This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America,” she said. “We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism.”
Somehow, I just can’t picture Sarah Palin saying the same thing about Hillary Clinton, or John Kerry, or Al Gore.
Again invoking Mr. Obama’s intermittent encounters with Mr. Ayers, Mr. McCain asked a crowd in Albuquerque, N.M., on Oct. 6, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” Someone in the crowd screamed in reply, “a terrorist!” Mr. McCain grimaced, but kept going.
I don’t even know that John McCain grimaced but, if he did, I don’t understand why he grimaced. Someone connected the dots he laid out there. He should have smiled at a job well done. Perhaps focusing on the racist or ethnic component of this lets McCain and Palin off too easy. After all, the root of this attack is so strained and so reaching that the whole concept should be ridiculed. William Ayers is a professor in the Illinois university system. They cut him a check. Is the whole Illinois university system unpatriotic? William Ayers wrote a grant request for the Chicago public school system. That request was granted by the Annenberg Foundation. Is the Annenberg Foundation a secret Muslim fifth-column organization?
We need to be honest. This attack on Barack Obama is an attempt to play on his exotic name, tie it to domestic white terrorism, then tie it all back to the 9/11 hijackers, and to make the American people distrust their next president. This line of attack would not work and would not be attempted against a white candidate with a Christian sounding name. Call it what you want, but it’s unfair and it’s dangerous. It’s reckless and irresponsible. And it’s unworthy of a great nation.
The republican party really needs to be “put out of business.” They’ve more than worn out their welcome. They need to have their license to operate, as a political party, pulled.
They have proven themselves to be an actual threat to the country. They are a dangerous, completely out-of-control entity. They are spurring their followers on, I believe, to committ acts of violence regarding the political opposition. Someone really needs to take a look at their license to operate.
I think it’s a huge testament to Obama’s character that he’s put up with this for 20 months and comes out smiling, ready to do the day’s work.
I don’t agree with all of his policies, but I do admire his strength and grace.
These have been despicable campaign tactics by McCain/Palin. I feel fairly confident that the voters see this as a desperate attempt to get back in the race. McCain himself has said in the past something to the effect of you know a campaign has nothing to offer when all they can muster is character assassination.
HRC did this very thing in the primary. My feeling was, at the time, that she was trying to poison Obama for the general. It was clear at the time that she could not overtake Obama’s delegate lead. What was left? Hurt Obama’s chances in the general, and try to convince enough voters to keep her close enough to either 1) persuade the super delegates to put her over the top, or 2) create doubt about Obama leading to a McCain win in November, giving her one more shot in 2012. Was this rational on my part? I don’t know, but I’ve never been as close to having the most powerful position in the world as HRC was. Who knows what anyone would do to get there.
As Clinton played out this similar strategy – not quite as dangerously as Palin is doing, obviously – Obama made serious gains into her sizable leads in PA, TX, and OH. Not enough to overtake her, but more than enough to show that Clinton’s tactics were defensive, not offensive.
I feel the same way about McCain/Palin. They are on the defensive, and I think these tactics play to their internal fears about an electoral wipe out. I don’t think these tactics are getting them new voters, only solidifying their base. The media is beginning to decry the fear-baiting rallies and the polls seem to be stable at this point.
26 days. We will see.
re Frum: for sometime now I’ve been head scratching about David; how could he move to America to go to work for W.Bush? I get the CBC out of Canada. David’s mother was a well loved and respected anchor of the CBC-TV evening news. She was deeply mourned across Canada. I now understand David. He’s rebelling against his mother’s left-leaning progressive views. It must be a contagion in the GOP. Oh if his Mom could be reincarnated. She’d smack and disown him.
Re the play on Obama’s name:
Professor Juan Cole reminds us why it’s dishonorable. Some need a refresher.
In February, 2008 here’s what John McCain had to say:
If not for some of our allies who carry the name Hussein we’d be facing gas lines and national bankruptcy. This McCain-Palin caper will be long remembered for the kind of people we are.
A great, great article in the New Yorker about the difficulties for Obama surrounding that elusive “white, working class vote”. It is an almost perfect reflection of the world that exists here in Ohio. If you’ve ever wondered why so many Ohioans seem to have a total disconnect when it comes to voting against their own personal economic interests, particularly this election cycle, this article lays it out.
Read it here.
First, I think you underestimate the degree to which all Democratic candidates (or nearly all) since Stevenson have been portrayed as “other” : i.e. unamerican, communist sympathizers, appeasers, San Francisco-blame America first, cultural elitists. So the attack against Democrats, including John Kerry and Bill Clinton were always in part attacks against their “real” Americanness.
That said, I do agree that Obama’s race and his middle name provide a means through which to subtly hype and create more doubt-so it’s as much cultural as it is racial (i.e. the use of the middle name as an epithet identifies him in the minds of detractors as “Muslim”, “foreign” and only incidentally as “black”. So the race factor is there and is exploited in variuos ways-but always enough to have plausible deniability.
But there is a much larger and much more frightening element to all of this: the attack is on the urban, educated, internationally aware components of American society. It is a direct appeal to and a direct attack on “cosmopolitanism”.
That is why it is not important to Palin, for example, as to what the cause is or is not of global warming. That is why taking time to understand the complexities of Abkhazia and S. Ossetia or the difference between Sunni and Shia is so unimportant. All you need to know is that “America is a force for good” and that its opponents are “evil” and so it is enough to simply denounce and oppose them.
The full implications of this are frightening in a way that was not quite clear with Reagan or Bush.
We’re seeing the hardest right campaign ever repackaged and sold as a moderate maverick campaign.
Excellent. What you identify is nativism pure and simple. It is what sent an equally provincial Germany over the edge.
thanks for this. the problem I have with tactics like these, is that somehow they magically become the problem of the target instead of the agressor. “Obama’s white voter problem”, “Obama’s inability to connect with rural, working class people”.
The onus is never put on the failure of the ignorant person who chooses to dismiss a candidate due to skin color or their lack of basic critical thinking skills that would often require about five minutes of search to debunk whatever lies they’ve swallowed gleefully. Muslim? Rush told me so! Friend of terrorist? McCain wouldn’t lie to me! Snobby elite? If Lady de Rothchild calls him that, then it has to be so!
The shitty place we find ourselves in during this era, though, is that when they’re called out on it, suddenly it’s all about them being race-baited, or the brown people are being too sensitive, or are racist themselves for calling out a white person/having the audacity to band together when attacked. It’s so much fun out here sometimes…
here’s why McCain won’t look Obama in the face or shake his hand
WATCH
The Ayers Ad
Now someone on Obama’s behalf should respond with
McCain’s Radical Past: Nazi and death squads links
and yet the coward didn’t raise it during the second debate. Wednesday should be interesting.
Rep be careful what you wish for. Sarah Palin brings more than a nasty voice to your party, she brings a strong dose of Secessionist philosophy.
For those who remember Susan Hu, here is what she has to say at Larry Johnson’s deranged PUMA blog today (I prefer not link to a racist site, but it’s called “No Quarter):
Nice. Obama’s a front man for radical left-wing terrorists, and for greedy capitalist fatcats. Quite a versatile operator, this!
When all this is over, don’t allow these smear merchants back into polite society. They know only too well what they’re doing.
I hadn’t realized exactly how derange SuHu had become. Very sad.
I call it Reason #1 why I’m not a Republican.
I like your article but I don’t like your casual comparison of the decision to have an abortion with the decision to gun your engine and run over a vagabond.
If you framed it as a choice where the vagabond is going to move into your home, eat your groceries, and quite possibly kill you, then you might have a fairer comparison.
There are other scenarios, like the example where you are not in any way responsible for the vagabond because it is your father (or some stranger) who destroyed his career and set him on a path of parasitism.
The abortion decision involves layer upon layer upon layer of moral quandary, and it can’t simply be reduced to a Commandment.
The morality is probably clearest in the abstract of ‘thou shalt not kill’. But even murder statutes allow for exceptions. As a matter of law and policy, there are many competing interests, including privacy, including compassion (any system that attempted enforcement would cause intense harm to people that innocently lost a pregnancy), including autonomy, and including dignity.
I don’t like lazy critiques of abortion law that fail to acknowledge these competing interests. You can ultimately reject them, but you do an injustice to the moral compass of abortion right’s activists if you ignore them.
In that instance I was simply illustrating the similarity between unknown persons being killed – all illustrations break down at some point and I probably could have found a better illustration, but the point there was simply that in both cases killing a person that nobody else knows to exist is equally murder.
There is such a thing as justifiable homicide, and that also applies across the board from conception to death, but it has to be consistent across the board – if it applies to the unborn then it has to apply to the born. I didn’t flesh that out in that article but I would love to have that discussion – after the election…
Well, it doesn’t have to be consistent between the born and the unborn, and currently, it isn’t.
One obvious difference is that a embryo or fetus (until late in the game) is utterly dependent on another human being and is basically in a parasitic and somewhat hostile relationship with its mother.
Again, you can ultimately call it a distinction without a difference, but to gloss it over completely is to beg the question, in my opinion.
The same could (and should!) be said about your average 13 year old.
yes and no.
Last week, we had Rush Limbaugh telling his ignorance audience that Sen. Obama was an Arab. Today, he said that he would endorse the idea the Obama is part of a sleeper cell.
Did Rush say what this sleeper cell intends to do once it is running the country?