Nothing demonstrated that John McCain’s presidential campaign was flat lining quite like the recent juxtaposition of Barack Obama blithely enthralling millions on his world tour with McCain desperately seeking an audience in a local supermarket.
Therefore, I am not all surprised that McCain decided to resort to the last refuge of all desperate politicians, namely the “kitchen-sink strategy.” Specifically, he decided to inject life into his campaign by running patently absurd ads, in which he blames Barack Obama for the high price of oil and compares him to air-head celebutarts Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
Unfortunately, since most American voters think the way simpletons Britney and Paris behave, this “juvenile” strategy actually resulted in gains for McCain in national polls. It’s no wonder then that he decided to execute it in the most absurd fashion.
When white politicians are threatened by black challengers, they invariably play the race card from the top of the deck by reinforcing all of the prejudices whites have about blacks. In this case, however, McCain pulled one from the bottom of the deck by accusing Obama of playing the race card against him. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black….)
In fact, he cited the following rhetorical riff, which Obama has been playing to white audiences all over America, as evidence to support his accusation:
Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, ‘he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name,’ you know, ‘he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.’
Clearly, the only thing racial (i.e., not racist) about this riff is the fact that Obama really does not look like any of the other presidents on dollar bills. Indeed, he has virtually nothing in common with the old white men like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant who grace U.S. currency.
More to the point, however, McCain really is trying to scare white Americans by portraying Obama variously as the anti-Christ or a black Moses (ridiculing him as “The One”) and as just another “uppity” black (deriding him as “naive”).
Therefore, the only thing truly remarkable about this latest spat between the two campaigns is the extent to which Obama resorted to patently absurd rationalizations to defend his perfectly reasonable rhetoric, which fairly described McCain’s strategy for what it is. For example, here’s how his campaign strategist Robert Gibbs defended it:
What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington.
You know this presidential campaign is going to be waged on a (pretty) moronic level of consciousness when McCain’s absurd charge is countered by Obama’s even more absurd defense.
Only in America folks…
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Noel says
Hey Anthony: I just don’t get how McCain can get away with the things he said and the ads he promotes on TV. Why can’t Obama and his campaign nip this shit in the bud? If McCain said something false why can’t Obama come out and just say, “That’s false” and explain to us, in non-moronic terms, why it’s false?
Oh, btw, I do get that he is not like any of those other presidents on our currency. I get that he has a funny last name and I get that he’s a black man trying to win the most powerful position on the planet while trying to convince all the white people in his country to give him a chance. Is this about race? You bet your ass it is! Have we got over the whole “scary black man” attitudes of the Jim Crowe era? Hell no! I see it everyday……He’s got some job ahead of him; the poll’s not withstanding.
funnygirl says
Very nice.