Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 12:50 pm Post subject: Republicans are pressing the 'Doomsday button'
Quote:
McCain has come full circle since 2000 and is now playing the brand of politics he once condemned
WASHINGTON–The anonymous emails claimed the candidate "chose to sire children without marriage."
Fliers placed on windshields after a debate claimed he had a "Negro child," bogus pollsters told voters he had slept with prostitutes, his wife had a sexually transmitted disease and was a drug addict, and that he had sold out his country while being held as a prisoner of war.
The whispers on the street were that he was mentally unstable.
"I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those," John McCain once said of the operatives who spread such malicious rumours and smeared him, his wife and a young girl his wife had brought home from an orphanage in Bangladesh.
That was South Carolina in 2000, when McCain faced-off against George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination.
In the waning days of the 2008 campaign, the Republican presidential nominee appears to have come full circle.
As he and running mate Sarah Palin rain attacks on front-running Democrat Barack Obama, McCain is playing the brand of politics he has condemned and he is a shadow of the man whose guilty conscience forced him to pull his own negative counterattacks on Bush in that now infamous 2000 Republican primary.
There is a direct link from 2000 to 2008 that explains this metamorphosis.
South Carolina is the birthplace of the legendary "dark prince" of negative politics, Lee Atwater, mentor to Karl Rove, in turn lauded by Bush as "The Architect" of his back-to-back presidential wins: the second propelled by the politics of fear and an attack on Democratic nominee John Kerry so effective that "swift boating" is now political shorthand in this country.
Rove, in turn, mentored McCain's 2008 political strategist, Steve Schmidt.
Now the Republicans are pushing what was known in the Atwater era as the Doomsday button.
All week, as Americans looked at the unfolding economic carnage with a mixture of fear and horror, the McCain campaign fixated on Obama's links to a one-time urban terrorist, they have run ads tying him to a former fundraiser convicted of influence peddling, they have allowed surrogates to emphasize his middle name "Hussein," they have called him a liar and tried to convince Americans the Democrat is a risky unknown, hinting darkly at a sinister agenda.
They have sown anger, with Republicans shouting charges of "terrorist" and "liar" at the mention of Obama's name.
Some have bellowed threats at Obama from the crowd.
The attacks on the Democratic presidential candidates worked in 2000 and 2004 – and historically work more often than they fail – but they appear destined to failure in 2008.
The attacks sound incongruous when financial news dominates this campaign, with fears of home foreclosures, dwindling retirement funds, job losses – even the future of American capitalism – swamping all else.
If Americans agree Obama is the calm hand needed in this time of crisis, McCain could claim the Illinois senator shares a box at Chicago White Sox games with `70s-era terrorist, William Ayers, without moving the polls.
If the character assault had stood a chance, it would have to have been launched earlier, some Republican insiders now grumble.
The Obama campaign has also learned the lessons of 2004 and the 1988 takedown of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, whose undoing was his support as Massachusetts governor for prison furloughs that allowed convicts such as murderer Willie Horton to be released. During his release, Horton committed armed robbery and rape, a fact the George H.W. Bush Republican team used to advantage.
The Obama team was ready and vigorously responded.
"I don't think Barack Obama is going to make the same mistake Mike Dukakis made in 1988 and, unfortunately, John Kerry made in 2004," Dukakis said in a recent interview on MSNBC, saying both he and Kerry sat by idly and allowed the smears to stick.
"I think one of the saddest things ... about the John McCain of today as opposed to the John McCain of eight or 10 years ago, is that a guy who was absolutely savaged by Rove and Bush in South Carolina in a despicable campaign in 2000, has now stooped to the point where he's hired a Rove protegé to run his campaign."
But there is no reason for the McCain campaign to shift gears now.
He is under pressure from many in the party to get tougher, to drop what appears to be his unilateral declaration that Obama's fiery pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should be off limits.
Even Palin has questioned why her teammate is not going after Obama's judgment for having a 20-year association with a man made famous during the Democratic primary for his "God damn America," sermon.
The nastiness is a fact of life that has governed campaigns in this country since its inception.
In 1800 Thomas Jefferson lashed out at John Adams' "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."
In 1828, a surrogate of John Quincy Adams branded Andrew Jackson "a gambler, a cock fighter, a slave trader and the husband of a really fat wife."
The difference is that those candidates didn't have Sean Hannity on Fox or Keith Olbermann on MSNBC acting as cheerleaders for either side, or the Internet spreading the message worldwide.
Yesterday in the battleground state of Indiana, the McCain campaign released an ad that tied Obama with corrupt Chicago politics, political boss and Obama adviser William Daley, one-time fundraiser and convicted felon Tony Rezko and Ayers.
Obama actually campaigned against the Daley Democratic machine in Chicago when he began his career there.
However, the truth doesn't deter the smears: "When convenient, he worked with terrorist Bill Ayers," another ad says.
"When discovered, he lied.
"Obama. Blind ambition. Bad judgment."
McCain is also being pushed by those who attend his rallies and right-wing radio hosts who are only getting angrier as they contemplate an Obama presidency.
"Certainly Barack Obama can learn a thing or two from John McCain, about what it means to be a patriot," William Platt, the Republican chair of Pennsylvania's Lehigh County, told a McCain-Palin rally this week.
"Think about how you'll feel on Nov. 5 if you see the news that Barack Obama – Barack Hussein Obama – is president of the United States."
A couple of days earlier, a county sheriff in Florida revved up the crowd at a McCain-Palin rally by invoking Obama's middle name, Hussein, and later said he had no regrets.
"I absolutely, unequivocally don't regret saying it," Michael Scott told local reporters.
"In order to be a speaker at this event, I had to give my full name – Michael Joseph Scott – to the Secret Service, even though I'm the sheriff of Lee County. So why would I apologize?
"Unless he changed his name, my position hasn't changed."
Then there is the guy now known nationally as Angry Wisconsin Guy who got a thumbs-up from McCain when he told him: "I'm mad. I'm really mad. It'll surprise you, it's not the economy. It's the socialists taking over our country," he said to huge cheers and a thumbs-up from McCain.
"When you have Obama, (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi and the rest of those hooligans up there running our country, we better have our heads examined. So go get 'em."
Inevitably, such broadsides spark chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A."
While an angry base appears energized, Obama is extending his lead over McCain and Palin's negatives keep rising.
"It's easy to rile up a crowd by stoking anger and division," Obama said yesterday in Chillicothe, Ohio.
"Americans aren't looking for someone who will divide this country. They are looking for someone to lead this country."
(from the Toronto Star)
What scares me is that whipping supporters up and polarizing things in this way will likely end in an assasination of a future President Obama (if that is indeed the result). Watch the country really go into meltdown then.
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Say it ain't so Joe!
