I’m home during a half day — which is lucky because I’ve got a head cold that beats all head colds — catching up on political news. Part of my research includes watching The View, which has gotten consistently more interesting since the addition of Whoopi Goldberg and the sad, plodding political leanings of Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who thinks Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayres is exactly the same as McCain’s relationship to the Keating Five scandal.
Hasselbeck’s is a new GOP talking point (she practically read her defense of McCain-Plain verbatim from a campaign email yesterday), one of the points that Palin has been casually mentioning on the campaign trail by trying to tie Ayres’ activities with The Weathermen to Obama to brand him a domestic terrorist. Although I think Kathy G may be minimizing Obama’s working relationship with Ayres (I don’t know, I’m a layperson), she has two interesting posts on the prevalence of the Ayres family in their Chicago neighborhood, which is to say that if you live there and are even nominally active in Chicago politics, you’ve probably rubbed shoulders with them. All fact-based reporting suggests that they didn’t have much of a relationship at all.
(Apparently that Todd Palin was a card-carrying member of the secessionist AIP, and involved enough that everyone assumed Sarah Palin was a member as well, isn’t an indicator of radical, unpatriotic beliefs.)
The real story, if the story is about character and judgement, as people like my mother assert, is this:
On this day of tit-for-tat politics, the Obama campaign missed the real reason why the Keating Five remain relevant 20 years later. The point lies not in the details of the bygone scandal (trust me, they are complex and murky), but in the way that McCain has abandoned in this presidential campaign all the good-government habits that he adopted after he was chastised by the Ethics Committee. As he recounted in his memoir, “I decided right then that not talking to reporters or sharply denying even the appearance of a problem wasn’t going to do me any good. I would henceforth accept every single request for an interview … and answer every question as completely and straightforwardly as I could.”
McCain, who until the spring was indeed the most accessible major politician in America, has veered completely in the other direction, avoiding reporters at one point for more than a month. As the decider on the Republican ticket, McCain is also responsible for the Arctic-chill media strategy that has almost completely muzzled Sarah Palin since her selection as his running mate.
Far more disturbing is that it has become difficult to believe that John McCain recalls the larger lessons about personal honor that he supposedly carried away from his Keating Five disgrace.
Indeed. Several years back when McCain was at his maverickiest, I remember thinking that he would be the only Republican on the stage that I would ever consider voting for. He was purportedly a man of integrity who, for all his faults, appeared to break from the GOP’s platforms where they made fiscal sense. As a person, McCain vowed never to take the low road. He was different than that, he said, especially during his presidential campaign in 2000, where he was accused by supporters of George W. Bush, and arguably by the Bush campaign itself, of fathering an “illegitimate black child” — Cindy McCain adopted their daughter Bridget from Bangladesh — that his wife Cindy was an drug addict, that he was gay, and that he was a “Manchurian Candidate” who was either a traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days. But today, members of McCain’s campaign staff include the old guard that once attacked him on these charges. And ironically, although they try to dogwhistle Americans who hold onto racist caricatures when they watch Barack Obama take the national stage, they may be sounding the death toll for the effectiveness of the Southern strategy.
And it’s sad, really sad, that this man whose entire political career was based on the idea of a different, more transparent kind of politics, has fallen to the level where he will sit idly by as he benefits from painting Obama as an untrustworthy, sinister Other. His supporters get it, too:
But it goes further than boos and hyperbole. During this Palin campaign stop in Florida,
“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.
“Boooo!” said the crowd.
“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'” she continued.
“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.
“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.
I wonder if Palin didn’t blink at that brand of domestic terrorism. But that’s me.