Barack's Drugs, Cindy's Charity, John's Terrorist, Sarah's Mobs

The McCain campaign has had some remarkable blunders this summer and fall, with, most memorably, the campaign staff once saying on the record that John McCain does not speak for the McCain campaign. The lack of coherence between the candidate, his veep, and the campaign staff has been an ominous indicator of what the West Wing would look like if he should win.

But now, officially, undeniably, the campaign has gone completely astray as supporters have begun to demand that Obama spend time discussing his college-years drug use, which earlier this year the McCain staff had suggested Obama had exaggerated to try to seem cool. Late edit: There's a joke in here somewhere, as the McCainer calling for this is Frank Keating, and that's a surname McCain can't afford to have brought up right now.

This follows having Cindy McCain falsely trash Obama at an event October 8. She claimed Obama voted against fully equipping the troops in Iraq, which now include her younger son, Jimmy. There were two such bills, one with a timeline for withdrawal, one without a timeline for withdrawal. Obama voted for one, McCain voted for the other. The important part of this is that the campaign has made Cindy a combatant, and that's going to have devastating results for her and for her husband.

You may recall Sarah Palin and who was it, Mitt Romney? spending time at the Republican National Convention in August sneering at Obama's community organizing work (and they haven't really been held responsible for depicting what George H.W. Bush had called "a thousand points of light" as contemptible suckers who did no "real" work; pretty much what Bush 41 thought, too. His gooey praise for unpaid volunteers, mostly women, doing social work for free which the government should have been paying for always rang hollow.)

Building on that, the McCain campaign has spent the past ten days trying hard to trash Obama's charity activities, particularly his service on an education-reform organization board financed by conservative Republican philanthropist Walter Annenberg, an old chum of Reagan's. That's where Obama met University of Illinois Professor William Ayers, who had been a violent radical in the 1960s - when Obama was eight years old. Obama did not meet the man until nearly thirty years later, just a couple of years before Ayers was chosen Chicago Citizen of the Year in 1997. The two men also later served as concurrent board members for an anti-poverty group.

So, in a remarkable confluence of foolishness, we have the McPalin ticket putting Cindy out front, raising questions about drug use, and raising questions about charity work.

Are they forgetting this? Obama may be too classy to bring it up, but I'm not. I'm very small fry and what I say is read by perhaps ten people on my busiest day, but sooner or later, some large blog or news outlet will get as annoyed by the confluence of the Cindy, charity, and drugs and put this Washington Post story out where it will migrate to cable news, or to 527 ads.

The Ayers-terrorist ploy has two flaws beyond putting charity work in the limelight: McCain's own terrorist connection, much stronger and fresher than Obama's, and the incitement to violence at Republican rallies this week.

McCain's repeated sniping about a 1995 state legislative fundraising event for Obama being hosted by a man who'd been a Weatherman nearly thirty years prior is finally being compared to McCain's own attendance at a 1993 fundraiser in which the speaker rose to sing the praises of a domestic terrorist who had shot a man two weeks before, and is still in prison for bombings perpetrated in the 1990s. Not 1968.

Not when McCain was eight years old, as Obama was during Ayers' criminal youth, but rather when McCain was 57, certainly old enough to be expected to disassociate himself from a known terrorist. And compare what they were raising funds for: Obama's 1995 event was raising funds for his own legislative run. McCain, in 1993, is lending his prestige to an event to raise funds for a notorious hate group that gives prime podium time to support a terrorist whose most recent attempted assassination was perpetrated only two weeks earlier. Later in 1993, McCain voted against a bill which targeted precisely that kind of domestic terrorism. It was a basic law-and-order bill with very strong Republican support - but McCain thought cosseting the violent Right was more important. Olbermann missed the last point, but covered the rest of this here.

Much was made this past week of the homicidal hatefulness that surfaced at McCain and Palin rallies, with shouts of "terrorist!" and "off with his head!" and "kill him!" and so forth, degenerating into >"bomb Obama!" at a Georgia rally for a senate candidate, and the n-word hurled at a black soundman for one of the TV crews. And much is being made of McCain finally, on Friday the 10th, being forced to respond to a supporter who told him to his face, at a televised event, that Obama is "an Arab." McCain took her mike away and said no, he's a good family man, the nation doesn't need to be scared of Obama as president if he wins.

What happened? What finally spoke to McCain, after more than ten days of stoking the "he's a terrorist!" fire? Was it some remnant of conscience? some remnant of "the old McCain," who supposedly was a better man than the current version? Or was it the Secret Service? Who or what stepped up and told him to knock it off? Was it, in fact, the polling numbers which had come out in the previous 24 hours proving that his hatefest was hurting him more than the Obama / Biden ticket?

I'm not impressed. Palin and McCain have befouled themselves, and the nation, by implementing this plan to divide and frighten along racial / ethnic lines. Lee Atwater started this with the infamous Willie Horton ads, and he personally taught Karl Rove how to do it, and Rove consults with the McCain campaign, and one of his protegés is running it. And it shows.

Obama has shown he can take a crowd and turn them joyous, hopeful cheering section. McCain and Palin have shown they can take a crowd and turn it into a raging, screaming lynch mob. Whom are they trying to attract? The answer is, no one. They knew that wouldn't attract independent voters. So what, exactly, were they trying to accomplish? McCain clearly is willing to wade through mud to get to the White House; is he willing to wade through blood, too? His Friday renunciation suggests that maybe not, maybe there are some things he won't do to win. Let's see how he behaves through the weekend and next week before making that call.

LATE EDIT: This was written Sunday, October 12. Monday, October 13, McCain continued to run the "Obama - terrorists - liar" ad in the swing-state radio market I live in, northern Virginia. And today, Tuesday, October 14, yet another supporter shouted out "Kill him!" at a Palin rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania. McCain has also turned on Congressman John Lewis, whom he dared to call a mentor earlier in the campaign, for Lewis' on-target identification of the race-baiting McPalin tactics with the very same behavior from the infamous George Wallace. Please, follow that link to read the language which Wallace used and I cannot. This is exactly what McCain is doing; exactly what he did when he hired the infamous Tucker Eskew, who attacked McCain's own dark-skinned daughter in 2000. Lewis is right, and right to speak up about it. I expect no less from Lewis, and as for McCain's shameful attack on him, well, I expect no better. I'm making the call: nope, there's nothing McCain won't do.