You probably recall that McCain hurt himself in the first debate with Obama because he came across as surly and angry--at least that's the interpretation I like best. A large part of this, I think, had to do with the fact that he didn't look Obama in the eye. McCain doubled down on this appearance of unsportsmanlike behavior when he gave Obama the cold shoulder after the bailout vote.
And, now, as the poll numbers really begin to turn against him, McCain and his running mate seem to be getting desperate. Now, McCain/Palin are beginning to deploy their last tactical ploy. You guessed it, racism.
What do they have left? They tried to portray themselves as "mavericks" and were brilliantly shot down by Biden last week. They tried to portray Obama as a pedophile intent on corrupting America's kindergartners, and they got mostly branded as a liar. They tried to show themselves as above the fray of ordinary politics, and only ended up looking ludicrously political in the worst possible way during the midst of a national financial crsis. And they tried to seem sensitive to women, but ended up insulting A LOT of women with the pick and roll-out of Palin.
Really, McCain seems deranged and Palin clueless. So why not go for broke? According to Dana Millbank, someone at a Palin rally shouted at a black sound man with one of the networks covering the event, "Sit down, boy."
Barack Obama, she told 8,000 fans at a rally here Monday afternoon, "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist!" This followed her earlier accusation that the Democrat pals around with terrorists. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America," she told the Clearwater crowd. "I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country." The crowd replied with boos.
McCain had said that racially explosive attacks related to Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are off limits. But Palin told New York Times columnist Bill Kristol in an interview published Monday: "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more."
Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
But maybe this isn't a last-ditch tactic but something always implicit in the way McCain refused to look at Obama during the debate? Maybe this is the inner-McCain finally coming out as he's being pushed into a corner? There was a good thread about this discussion at Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog, as well as a discussion of why Obama did right not to get angry.
In either case, this can only get ugly really fast, as such anger and racial smear might carry McCain/Palin to victory but in the process bring the country down with them. For, in order to work, this tactic has to play on the worst impulses among us, make old wounds hurt again and current irrational fears more irrational, and play the politics of destruction to a point of no return. A pyrrhic victory is what I believe such a win for McCain/Palin would be called.
Really, the only honorable thing left for McCain is to reign his hate-mongering in and prepare to lose with some dignity. We'll see tonight, I guess, whether he is capable of doing this by whether and how he looks at Obama.