admission of a certain kind of defeat

Running While Black

NY TIMES

By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 2, 2008

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office -
say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford - the opposition feels compelled to run
low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who
have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew
something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general
campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as "the American president Americans
have been waiting for."

There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the
Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in
some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us -
the "us" being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed
at.

Since then, Senator McCain has only upped the ante, smearing Mr. Obama every
which way from sundown. On Wednesday, The Washington Post ran an
extraordinary front-page article that began:

"For four days, Senator John McCain and his allies have accused Senator
Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military
hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence
that the charge is true."

Evidence? John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the
opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent's
patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of
treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United
States lose a war if that would mean that he - Senator Obama - would not
have to lose an election.

Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the
slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women
(both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing
underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a
commercial critical of Mr. Obama.

The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly
disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a
strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee
described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, "Harold,
call me."

Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the
Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the
hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still
freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and
becoming sexually involved with white women.

The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control.
It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama
in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It's
driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant,
too big for his britches - a man who obviously does not know his place.

Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic
levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this - the sole reason - is
that he is black.

So there he was this week speaking evenly, and with a touch of humor, to a
nearly all-white audience in Missouri. His goal was to reassure his
listeners, to let them know he's not some kind of unpatriotic ogre.

Mr. Obama told them: "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 those dollar bills, you
know. He's risky."

The audience seemed to appreciate his comments. Mr. Obama was well-received.

But John McCain didn't appreciate them. RACE CARD! RACE CARD! The McCain
camp started bellowing, and it hasn't stopped since. With great glee
bursting through their feigned outrage, the campaign's operatives and the
candidate himself accused Senator Obama of introducing race into the
campaign - playing the race card, as they put it, from the very bottom of
the deck.

Whatever you think about Barack Obama, he does not want the race issue to be
front and center in this campaign. Every day that the campaign is about race
is a good day for John McCain. So I guess we understand Mr. McCain's
motivation.

Nevertheless, it's frustrating to watch John McCain calling out Barack Obama
on race. Senator Obama has spoken more honestly and thoughtfully about race
than any other politician in many years. Senator McCain is the head of a
party that has viciously exploited race for political gain for decades.

He's obviously more than willing to continue that nauseating tradition.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New York Magazine

The Low-Road Warrior

Mudslinging will damage McCain's brand-but it may be the only way he can
win.

* By John Heilemann
* Published Aug 1, 2008

On the morning in March when Barack Obama was preparing to give his speech
on race in Philadelphia to try to contain the fallout from the Jeremiah
Wright imbroglio, I was having breakfast in Washington with a member of John
McCain's inner circle. The topic at hand was whether McCain was licking his
chops at the prospect of facing Obama in the fall-whether he relished the
idea of running negative against the hopemonger on questions of his
patriotism and, er, otherness. My McCainiac source noted that his boss had
"demonstrated admirable restraint and respect for Obama in the last few
weeks," citing McCain's rebuke of the Tennessee GOP when it issued a press
release that invoked Obama's middle name and featured that photo of him in
Somali tribal clothing, calling it "Muslim garb." "McCain has drawn a
bright
line and said that's unacceptable," my companion said. "It's a genuine
reflex: He really wants the campaign to be civil."

The following night I was drinking with a big-time Republican operative who'd
worked during the primaries for a rival candidate. When I floated the notion
of the Good McCain, this person snorted. "He didn't have a problem calling
Mitt Romney a phony in New Hampshire or comparing George W. Bush to Bill
Clinton in South Carolina in 2000," he said. "McCain is a tough guy. He'll
do whatever he needs to do."

Until last week, it was an open question which of these visions of McCain
bore a closer relation to reality. But with the weeklong string of attacks
uncorked by the Arizona senator and his people during Obama's trip abroad
and in its aftermath-some brutal, some mocking, but all personal and focused
on Obama's character-we now have an inkling of just how deep in the mud
McCain and his people are willing to wallow in order to win in November:
right up to their Republican eyeballs.

As countless fact-checkers and tsk-tskers have maintained, the broadsides
were a blend of distortion, innuendo, and outright slander. But that doesn't
mean they (and their inevitable successors) won't prove effective,
especially against an opponent with so little experience under ruthless and
relentless fire. Before Obama hurled himself into the presidential scrum he'd
never been hit with a negative ad-a point often raised by Hillary Clinton's
people. And though they made sure Obama lost his negative-spot virginity,
the ads they ran against him were patty-cake compared with what he faces
now. Hence the questions on which the general election may turn: Will Obama
be capable of withstanding the pummeling the McCain forces have begun to
unleash? Or, as Hillary privately predicted, will he crumple like a paper
doll?

For those not keeping score, a quick review of the McCain campaign's lunge
for Obama's jugular. First, its new slogan: "Country first," with its
inverse insinuation that Obama puts something else (i.e., his own ambition)
ahead of the nation. Second, McCain's accusation that Obama "would rather
lose a war in order to win a political campaign." Third, the McCain ad
"Troops," which claims that Obama, while in Germany, "made time to go the
gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops-seems the Pentagon wouldn't
allow him to bring cameras." And, finally, the ad "Celeb," with its
intercut
images of Obama in Berlin, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears.

The strategy behind all this isn't hard to discern: Drive up Obama's
negatives and render him unacceptable to pivotal voting blocs. Thus the
depiction of him as too young, too feckless, and too pampered to be
president. (In almost every shot in the McCain ads, Obama is smiling
flashily, whereas McCain is pictured as weathered, sober, staring hard into
the distance-a clever bit of jujitsu, using Obama's pretty mug against him.)
Thus the portrayal of him as precious, self-infatuated, and effete: "Only
celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand
'MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find
organic brew-Black Forest Berry Honest Tea' and worry about the price of
arugula," wrote campaign manager Rick Davis in an e-mail announcing
"Celeb."
And thus the emphasis on Obama's rock-star persona, designed to engender
envy and contempt among the swath of Middle America for which hipness is no
virtue but a sign of pretension.

The racial undertones of this assault are subtle but undeniable, as Obama
himself suggested when he asserted last week that his opponents are trying
to make voters "scared" of him because he "doesn't look like the other
presidents on the currency." They're most glaring in "Troops," which
features footage of Obama sinking a three-pointer in Kuwait, despite the
fact that the shot took place at a military base, which undermines the ad's
argument. But the spot's deeper aim is to foster an unconscious simile:
Obama as a blinged-up, camera-hungry, NBA shooting guard, Allen Iverson with
a Harvard Law degree. Am I reaching? Consider this: Would the ad have
featured footage of Obama on a golf course draining a hole-in-one? "No, it
wouldn't," laughs a GOP media savant. "The racial angle is the first thing I
thought of when I saw that ad. It fits into the celebrity stuff, too." (For
McCain, that impolitic, pro-Obama Ludacris track was manna from hip-hop
heaven.)

Many of McCain's advisers from 2000, such as John Weaver and Mike Murphy,
express qualms about the campaign's newly nasty tone. (One can only imagine
the sigh of relief emanating from Mark McKinnon, the heralded adman who
helped McCain win the nomination but whose aversion to taking a cleaver to
Obama caused him to sit out the general.) "In this kind of year-a change
election, with big issues at stake-that sort of campaign is not gonna be in
a voice the American people can understand," Weaver tells me. "And at some
point, John will need the goodwill that he spent years achieving." And you
think he's in danger of losing that? "This is not a cost-free exercise," he
says.

But Weaver, Murphy, and McKinnon are no longer guiding McCain. Instead, the
motor behind his operation now is Steve Schmidt, the shaven-headed
strategist who earned his bones running Karl Rove's war room in 2004,
Frenchifying and de-war-heroizing John Kerry. What Schmidt and his
associates have apparently concluded is that McCain's weaknesses-on the
election's most salient issues and as a candidate-are so pronounced and
Obama's vulnerabilities so glaring that the low road is their guy's best,
and maybe only, route to the White House. They've concluded, in other words,
that even if McCain may not be able to win the election in any affirmative
sense, he might still wind up behind the big desk if he and his people can
strip the bark off Obama with sufficiently vicious force.

If this sounds like an admission of a certain kind of defeat, that's because
it is. But in the prevailing political circumstances-the hunger for change
in the electorate, the abject bankruptcy of the Republican brand, McCain's
positions on the wrong side of the public on the war and the economy, his
age, and his pitiful performance skills-it may reflect a cold-eyed realism
that's an asset in any campaign. Moreover, at least in the short term, it
actually seems to be working. Measured against the generic Democratic
ballot, Obama continues to underperform dramatically. And since shifting to
a more harshly negative posture, McCain has gained ground on Obama in
Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, according to recent Quinnipiac swing-state
polls.

All of which, naturally, has more than a few Democrats in a state of mortal
dread, although they tend not to be the types with GOT HOPE? bumper stickers
on their Volvos. Making them all the more queasy is what they regard as
Obama's tepid and too-placid responses to the most scurrilous of McCain's j'accuses.
"Obama says he's 'disappointed' in McCain when he charges him with near
treason, patronizing him, as if he's got a twenty-point lead with a week to
go," says one tough-minded organizer on the left. "It's shades of Swift
Boat."

To be fair, by the end of last week Obama didn't sound excessively serene.
He had toughened his rhetoric, and so had his campaign. But even then, they
were playing defense, fighting the battle on the turf defined by Team
McCain. Obama's calling out of the racial component of his opponent's
attacks, though justified, opened the door to the McCain countercharge that
it's he who is slapping down the race card-a claim that, however ludicrous,
puts Obama in the position of denying, in effect, that he's a smoother,
calmer, version of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and his former pastor,
Wright. What's more, there's reason to worry that the Democrat, as Jonathan
Chait contended recently in the Los Angeles Times, is "making the enormous
mistake of letting the race be entirely about him, which is the only way he
can lose."

The alternative, of course, is to get on offense, to batter McCain for his
gaffes and incoherence, hammer him for his flip-flops, highlight how his
maverick status is a thing of the past, and turn him into a combination of
Bush and Grandpa Simpson. God knows there are those in Chicago champing at
the bit to do just that-not least, one imagines, Obama's chief strategist,
David Axelrod, who can wield the cudgel of negative ads with as much vigor
and glee as any Republican. Yet Obama seems reluctant to go there. Tough pol
though he is, he's a conciliator and not a confrontationalist at heart; he
seems to believe that once undecided voters know him better, he will have
them eating, along with so many others, out of the palm of his hand.

And who knows, even if Obama stays above the fray, he might still pull this
thing off. Because as unwilling as he is to get down and dirty, McCain may
simply be unable to drive a consistent negative message. "John is
uncomfortable doing this stuff," says Weaver. "And it isn't in his
skill-set. It's like adopting the West Coast offense and making Dick Butkus
your quarterback." Butkus, it should be noted, was a linebacker-which
actually makes the metaphor more apt. Obama may hesitate to call the right
plays, but he knows the difference between offense and defense, and is
unlikely to wind up sprinting into his own end zone.
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