{"id":111,"date":"2008-11-07T13:41:27","date_gmt":"2008-11-07T13:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/cityofbrass\/2008\/11\/playing-with-fire.html"},"modified":"2008-11-07T13:41:27","modified_gmt":"2008-11-07T13:41:27","slug":"playing-with-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/2008\/11\/playing-with-fire.html","title":{"rendered":"playing with fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Newsweek is doing a seven-part story on the 2008 campaign which provides all manner of fascinating behind-the-scenes perspectives. The installment on the period of time spanning the debates is notable for the discussion of how the Otherization of Obama<\/a> proceeded in the background:<\/p>\n

At the Clearwater rally, someone in the crowd used a racial epithet
\nabout a black sound man for NBC, and someone else reportedly yelled
\n“Kill him!” in an ambiguous reference to either Ayers or Obama. By the
\nend of the week, YouTube was showing film clips of Palin crowds
\nshouting “Treason!”, “Off with his head!” and “He is a bomb!” At a
\nMcCain-Palin rally in Strongsville, Ohio, a man called Obama a “one-man
\nterror cell,” and in one unsettling film clip a voter’s young daughter
\nexclaims about Obama, “You need gloves to touch him!”<\/p>\n

Palin,
\nthe polls showed, had succeeded in rallying the Republican base. But
\nshe, or the simmering anger around her, helped make Obama supporters
\nout of countless independent voters.<\/p>\n

On the weekend
\nbetween the second and third debates, Congressman John Lewis–a
\ncivil-rights hero who had been beaten while staging nonviolent protests
\nduring the 1960s–issued a press release accusing McCain and Palin of
\n“playing with fire” and seeming to compare McCain to former Alabama
\ngovernor George Wallace, a segregationist infamous for stirring racial
\nfears. McCain was stunned. He had devoted a chapter to Lewis in one of
\nhis books, “Why Courage Matters.” He so admired Lewis that he had taken
\nhis children to meet him.<\/p>\n

McCain was on his bus, about
\nto board a plane in Moline, Ill., when he read the remarks on an aide’s
\nBlackBerry. He was so dumbfounded that he held the plane on the tarmac
\nwhile he considered how to respond. Salter, who had penned the chapter
\non Lewis, urged McCain to remain more dignified than Lewis had been in
\nhis remarks. But Schmidt called in from headquarters brimming with
\noutrage. “Sir,” said Schmidt, “he called you a racist. It must be
\nresponded to.” Nicolle Wallace agreed. Salter was not so sure. He was
\n“very pained” over the incident, Schmidt later recalled about Salter,
\nbut his instinct told him not to get his boss into a name-calling fight
\nwith a martyr of the civil-rights movement. McCain decided to go with
\nSchmidt and put out a strong statement calling on Obama to “immediately
\nand personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments.”
\n(Obama left it to a spokesman to blandly state, “Senator Obama does not
\nbelieve that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way
\ncomparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies.”)<\/p>\n

According
\nto several aides, McCain had trouble shaking his sadness over Lewis’s
\nstatement. To the reporters traveling with McCain, the candidate seemed
\nuncertain, as if he was not quite sure what he had gotten himself into.
\nIn an effort to raise doubts about Obama, McCain had given a stump
\nspeech in which he asked the audience, “Who is<\/em> Barack Obama?”
\nAt an earlier rally in Albuquerque a man shouted, “A terrorist!” McCain
\npaused, taken aback. He looked surprised, troubled. But he continued
\nwith the speech. (Salter later said McCain wasn’t sure that he had
\nheard correctly.)<\/p>\n

A couple of days later, at a rally in
\nLakeville, Minn., he seemed to find his bearings. “If you want a fight,
\nwe will fight,” he said. “But we will be respectful. I admire Senator
\nObama and his accomplishments. I will respect him, and I want–no, no,”
\nMcCain said to loud boos. “I want everyone to be respectful.” In the
\nquestion-and-answer period, a middle-aged woman in a bright red shirt
\ntook the mike and said, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him,
\nand he’s not, he’s not, he’s a, um–he’s an Arab.”<\/p>\n

“No.
\nNo, ma’am. No, ma’am. No, ma’am. No, ma’am,” McCain said, taking back
\nthe wireless mike. “He’s a decent family man, a citizen, that I just
\nhappen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues; that’s what
\nthis campaign is about. He’s not. Thank you.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For what it’s worth, the Secret Service reviewed the tapes and it seems that no one actually yelled “kill him” at the Palin rally, but everything else is as described above. <\/p>\n

It’s clear that McCain was reluctant to enter the fever swamp, whereas Palin marched right in. I note that it took Lewis’ denunciation for McCain to really wake up to what was going on, and after that point is when the candidate started trying to tamp it down.<\/p>\n

\n

The campaign’s internal polls showed that those lower-income swing
\nvoters in industrial states had not forgotten about Wright. In the view
\nof some of his advisers, McCain had a chance to really hurt Obama by
\ndredging up those videotapes of his longtime pastor crying “Goddam
\nAmerica!” But McCain did not want to. He did not want to do anything
\nthat smacked of racism. Some of his aides had quietly wished that the
\n527s, the independent- expenditure groups, would do the campaign’s
\ndirty work by running ads about Wright. Yet others worried that the
\n527s would indeed run lurid ads about Wright–and that McCain would get
\nthe blame. In any case, the big conservative moneymen who might fund
\nsuch a smear campaign were lying low, and not just because their
\nportfolios were suffering in the stock-market dive. They didn’t want to
\nbe called racist, either.<\/p>\n

McCain had set firm
\nboundaries: no Jeremiah Wright; no attacking Michelle Obama; no
\nattacking Obama for not serving in the military. McCain balked at an ad
\nusing images of children that suggested that Obama might not protect
\nthem from terrorism; Schmidt vetoed ads suggesting that Obama was soft
\non crime (no Willie Hortons); and before word even got to McCain,
\nSchmidt and Salter scuttled a “celebrity” ad of Obama dancing with
\ntalk-show host Ellen DeGeneres (the sight of a black man dancing with a
\nlesbian was deemed too provocative).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

However, the damage had been done:<\/p>\n

\n

“I’m worried,” Gregory Craig said to a NEWSWEEK reporter in
\nmid-October. He was concerned that the frenzied atmosphere at the Palin
\nrallies would encourage someone to do something violent toward Obama.
\nHe was not the only one in the Obama campaign thinking the unthinkable.
\nThe campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing
\na sharp and very disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September
\nand early October. Michelle was shaken by the vituperative crowds and
\nthe hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. “Why would they try to make
\npeople hate us?” she asked Valerie Jarrett. Several of Obama’s friends
\nin the Senate were shocked by the GOP rabble-rousing. Dick Durbin, the
\nU.S. senator from Illinois who pushed for early Secret Service coverage
\nfor Obama, called Lindsey Graham, who was traveling with McCain.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That damage persists now, after the election.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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City of Brass is his weblog, which was founded in 2002 under the name UNMEDIA. He is a co-founder of the annual Brass Crescent Awards. The name City of Brass refers to the Story of the City of Brass in the Thousand and One Nights, and the poem by Rudyard Kipling of the same name: Here was a people whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion; And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust. -- Thousand and One Nights, Story of the City of Brass IN A land that the sand overlays, the ways to her gates are untrod, A multitude ended their days whose fates were made splendid by God, Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall, And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all! -- Rudyard Kipling, The City of Brass (1909)"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}