McCain and the Republican Race Baiters

Bob Herbert takes McCain to task. McCain should be ripped apart for exploiting race, trying to appeal to the "white working class" by painting Obama as scary.

People who are racist shouldn't be coddled. They should be shunned. Unfortunately, we still have a strong undercurrent of racism in this country and exploiting it, strangely enough, has politically advanced McCain, or so says the media. I guess we'll see how politically advanced he is in November.

Paul Krugman put it like this a year ago:

I thought I was quite clear: the leadership doesn’t care about race, but uses it to win elections; it’s the base that cares.

So not only are racists despicable people, they are being used as pawns, so that makes them stupid, too.

McCain no longer garners any respect here. McCain officially is a low-minded panderer. A Grumpy one, too. The lower he goes, the more Obama supporters get in gear.

NYT: Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.

Since then, Senator McCain has only upped the ante, smearing Mr. Obama every which way from sundown. On Wednesday, The Washington Post ran an extraordinary front-page article that began:

McCain Selling Arrogance

The McCain camp has accused Obama of playing the race card.

The Obama camp says no. It says McCain has run out of ideas. Besides, Obama doesn't have time for that nonsense. 

CNN: "You haven't heard a positive thing out of that campaign in a month. All they do is try to run me down," Obama said while campaigning Wednesday in Union, Missouri.

The accusation came the same day that the Obama campaign released an ad comparing McCain to President Bush, and the McCain campaign released one likening Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

"Since they don't have any new ideas, the only strategy they've got in this election is to try to scare you about me," Obama said.

But dig down deep into McCain's negative appeal and what do you find? I can get directly to the point. McCain and his crew are subtly appealing to racists or to put it nicely, the "white working class" voter. It's genius really. It's the exact tactic used by Hillary in the primaries: Appeal to the racist voters and then accuse Obama of pulling the race card.

For people who don't like to admit that they'd never vote for a black man, the line that Obama is arrogant, an uppity celeb, is much easier to swallow. They can ride with that one and they're having a heyday. It makes everyone feel good.

Note, I'm not saying that EVERYONE who dislikes Obama is racist. I'm saying the ones taking the bait -- these foolish ads that McCain has out. We learned this from Hillary's campaign. People who would rather not admit they'd never vote for a black man need something to buy and McCain is selling.

Who are the ads targeting? I'd say Appalachia, the so-called "lunch box" workers. Remember them?

The smart people, the folks who aren't racist, oppose Obama based on policy and they don't need an immature TV ad to hang on to. They can argue based on the issues.

Too bad for McCain there won't be enough racists to tip the election.
Here's a new video that shows that McCain was planning to attack Obama if he HAD visited the soldiers in Germany. He would've been attacked for precisely the reason Obama decided not to go.