The last week of the presidential campaign can only be described as the “Countdown to ‘Nigger’”. Rallies featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin became so vitriolic that McCain himself felt compelled to pull things back a bit on Friday by telling his own supporters that they didn’t need to be scared of an Obama presidency. (That the attacks apparently haven’t been effective didn’t make it any easier to do.) Prior to that humiliating moment it was only a matter of time until either violence broke out or that most vile of American racial insults was picked up by a microphone. The generally accepted explanation for this ugly turn is that the Red campaign, led by Palin accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists”, began all but explicitly race baiting its supporters and things snowballed from there. The racism on display cannot be ignored, but keeping the White House white isn’t the primary motivation behind all that anger.
Things really got rolling with a Dana Milbank piece in Tuesday’s Washington Post. The two most newsworthy incidents were a black network employee being verbally abused (a “racial epithet” was used and he was told to “sit down, boy”) and someone in the crowd yelled “Kill him!” (it’s unclear whether this was in reference to Obama or William Ayers, the ex-radical Obama’s had some association with). The buildup continued as video of McCain and Palin speaking through shouts of “terrorist” and “treason” began to make the rounds. Despite the remarks being obviously audible neither of them broke from their prepared remarks. (McCain, at least, flinched and winced; Palin just kept on going.) From the left and the right the commentariat condemned these words and the tactics that led to them and everyone was waiting for the dread word “nigger” to drop, or, worse yet, report of some politically motivated hate crime.
The Milbank piece appeared the morning of the second debate. Heading into Tuesday evening the big question was whether or not McCain would raise Ayers or any of his other “Who is Barack Obama?” attacks on live national television with Obama himself ten feet away. He didn’t, not directly or even by allusion, and the tone at the rallies became even uglier. The original video of this, captured from a cable news channel, has been taken down, but this being the Age of Everyone Has a Camera, I found a different version on YouTube:
That guy complained about how “mad” he was about how things were going and the crowd stood up and applauded. The people in that crowd were desperate for McCain and Palin to attack Obama harder than they already had and the knee jerk reaction to that and other similar incidents is to see these crowds as angry, bordering on hysterical, and more or less outright racist. The same goes for the people in this video. Titled “The McCain-Palin Mob” it was filmed and posted by a site called blogger interrupted and has already had more than a million views:
It’s certainly understandable to see these people as little more than racist Ohio morons talking about Obama’s “bloodlines”. But to do so is dismissive of the more fundamental cause. There are doubtless some out and out racists but for the most part those people aren’t inherently opposed to the idea of a black president. They don’t subscribe to quackery about Negroid Man being inferior to Caucasoid Man or some shit like that. Rather, they see a very scary world which has only grown scarier in the last few weeks as the financial crisis has imperiled the economy and John McCain’s chances. Remember that for the people at these campaign events the term “Wall Street” doesn’t connote wealthy conservatives, it connotes wealthy liberals.
Who are these people? They’re the conservatives caught in the squeeze. You can go to pollingreport.com and see Bush’s job approval rating hovering in the mid twenties and the right track/wrong track numbers in the mid teens. There’s roughly a ten point discrepancy and even if the polls are off by a few points you’re still talking about millions of Americans caught in that overlap. These people still believe in Bush but also think the country is going to hell in a hand basket; they are the people you see on YouTube ranting about Obama’s election leading to terrorism. It comes out as racism (against black people or Arabs/Muslims which to them are the same thing) but it isn’t fundamentally motivated by racism. They think the only thing standing between them and ruin these last seven years has been George W. Bush and they don’t think McCain is up to the task.
Castigating these people as being an angry racist mob is incorrect and frankly unjust. The Americans in that line, the ordinary citizens in those riled McCain/Palin crowds, aren’t bad people and the fundamental emotion that’s roiling them into such a frothing rage isn’t anger or simple racism; it’s fear.
Government fear mongering has been part of the background noise of American life for seven years now and this is the inevitable result. Every time the terror alert level goes up or down national anxiety builds. Every time an official says discussing our eavesdropping policies helps al-Qaeda it scares people just a little bit more. Every time water boarding or any of our other torture techniques are discussed it reminds people that scary men are out there and we have to do terrible things to protect ourselves. Government officials, all the way up to Bush the Younger, say that orange alerts deter attacks, that illegal wiretapping catches terrorists, and that torturing people has saved lives. The fact that these statements are provably false doesn’t prevent millions of people from believing them.
Put yourself in their shoes for a moment, these people really believe that there are terrorists lurking everywhere and it’s only the forthright President who’s kept us safe. As if that wasn’t bad enough the economy, which hasn’t been kind to most of them lately, now looks set to head off a cliff. Bush the Younger seems to feel the same way, from Saturday’s New York Times:
“He said that if it was going to happen at all, he was glad it was happening under his presidency, because he had a good group of people in D.C. working for him,” Dru Van Steenberg, one of several small-business owners who met with Mr. Bush in San Antonio earlier this week. The president expressed the same sentiment, others said, during a similar private session in Chantilly, Va., the next day.
“He said that whoever was going to take over in January was going to have a huge crisis on their hands the day they come into office,” Ms. Van Steenberg added. “He thought by this happening now, that perhaps everyone could see signs of improvement before the next president comes into office.”
It’s easy to dismiss those sentiments as the ramblings of a broken president who isn’t fit to care for a houseplant much less the United States of America, but millions of people feel the same way. When popular majorities and most of his own party just want him gone it’s all too easy to forget that there are a lot of Americans who are going to be sorry to see him leave office. Those people are not often commented upon but they’re the same people who go to McCain/Palin rallies and yell at the candidates for not being tough enough on a man they see as the embodiment of their fears.
They’re terrified right down to their cores and not just because a black man is about to become President (though that doesn’t help). They’re terrified because for the last seven years the government of this country has been going out of its way to terrify them into fearing Muslims, liberals and the very notion of having anyone but George W. Bush in the White House. If four years ago John Kerry had held a poll lead similar to what Obama’s is now we’d have seen a lot of this same ugliness. The fact that Obama is black, that he shares a middle name with a recently deposed Iraqi dictator and that his last name is one consonant away from being the same as our nemesis exacerbates things, but the underlying cause here isn’t simple racism. It’s the fear mongering that the executive branch has been practicing. Its victims need sympathy, not scorn.
