Writing at Alternet this week Matt Taibbi (he of the wonderful and hilarious Jesus retreat story in Rolling Stone) breaks through any remaining post-racial kumbaya bullshit by getting into some of the uglier realities of the 2008 election. He digs out and highlights the red meat of the still nascent campaign to paint Barack Obama as an effete, terrorist supporting, you-know-who. Along the way he encounters several John McCain supporters who can’t quite express what they don’t like about Obama, they just know that they don’t like him:
Cindy Oestriecher, a McCain supporter who turned out for his speech in New Orleans, is stumped when I ask her for an example of Obama’s lack of patriotism. “What was that thing about anti-American?” she asks a friend. “What were they referring to?”
“What thing?” asks the friend.
“People were talking about that thing, that anti-American thing,” Cindy says, frowning.
“You mean about the flag, the thing on the Internet?” the friend replies.
“Yeah, I guess,” says Cindy. “The anti-American thing.” “That bothers you?” I ask.
“Of course it does!”
“But you don’t even know what it is,” I say. “You just know that someone else said he was anti-American. You don’t even know who it was that said it!”
She shrugs. What’s my point?
Link (via The American Conservative)
That exchange reminded me of a strikingly similar incident recounted by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books. This one occurred in 2004, just days before the election:
When Bush, in full rhetorical flower in Tinker Field, declared to his delirious audience that “Americans need a president who doesn’t think terrorism is ‘a nuisance,’” my neighbor Ms. Richardson-Pinto nudged me with her elbow and shouted over the laughter and cheers, “Do you believe Kerry said that?” Actually, I shouted into her ear, Kerry hadn’t said that, and then I paraphrased for her the actual quotation:
“We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution… [and] illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where…it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”
Hardly exceptional; indeed, Bush himself had only weeks before said something very similar. Ms. Richardson-Pinto, a well-educated, worldly woman-a doctor, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist in women’s softball-listened to me intently, nodded politely, began to form a question, and then, thinking better of it, looked at me for a moment longer before turning back to the President. She’d had a choice what-or rather whom-to believe; and she’d made it.
Those two exchanges happened three and a half years apart. That interval has seen the Iraq war drag on without end, the destruction of New Orleans, the Democratic takeover of Congress and the public’s permanent disillusionment with Bush the Younger, but you wouldn’t know it from the quotes. The fear that sunk John Kerry, that he was somehow un-American and a threat to us all should he get his manicured hands on the levers of power, still exists. The essential question is whether or not those feelings are still prevalent enough to consign Barack Obama to the same fate.
Taibbi’s piece points out the fact that exploiting those feelings, with the 2008 twist of skin color thrown in as well, is likely McCain’s best (if not only) hope for victory. As Danner documents, on 2 November 2004 the policies of Bush the Younger were already unpopular, but the man himself was not. Here in 2008 the policies and the man are unpopular (dramatically more so in fact), but the man isn’t running. In order to win John McCain needs to make Barack Obama, who has the popular policies, personally unpopular; and to do that he has little choice but to let the shit, racism and all, fly fast and heavy. There’s something else worth considering though.
At this moment we are now farther from Election Day 2004 than it was from 11 September 2001. The fear and the anger from that day were a lot more potent four years ago than they are now. The fear was that there might be another attack if Bush the Younger was deposed. The anger led to the Iraq War, and then built on itself when some so called Americans questioned the legitimacy of it. Those two primal emotions doomed any equivocal positions John Kerry took, and he took a lot of them.
In Obama we now have a candidate whose position on Iraq is as close to unequivocal as can be in modern politics. Now we have a country less fearful and less angry. Now we have a campaign that directly responds to smear attacks at their earliest inkling. Will it be enough? The polls look good, the fundraising looks good, and we are a media world away from where things were in 2004. John Kerry ran a middling campaign in very difficult circumstances and still came very close to pulling it off. Barack Obama has already proved himself a better campaigner; he’s also got a friendlier environment and a weaker opponent. If sliming him is enough to overcome al that then we’re all in deep shit, but it won’t be.
(P.S. As I go to post this, what do I see on Talking Points Memo? Exactly what I’m talking about.)
