The Rest of the Electorate

Barbara left a comment on my Weekend Assignment from Friday morning that gave me pause:

I certainly hope that people chose who to vote for based on issues and not the email/tv garbage that goes on. I find it offensive that anyone would think if you don't vote for Obamba it was for the reasons you mentioned.
Barbara

She has a point. It's easy to forget that the "low information voters" who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, and Socialist, a terrorist and all-around scary guy represent a small percentage (I hope!) of John McCain's supporters. Even so, the people who believe these things are out there, and they're very real. I replied to Barbara in comments,

Barbara--
Oh, I agree. I'm sure there are people who are voting for McCain because they agree with his foreign policy, and maybe even on the economy. Unfortunately, I get smear emails every day from a friend who uncritically forwards every anti-Obama email, however irrational or disingenuous, including one that makes false claims about the Bible to convince people Obama is the Anti-Christ. I see footage of Palin supporters calling Obama all those names I mentioned, and heard robocalls making all sorts of horrific claims.

Fortunately, like you, I believe that most Republicans reject the hysterical and false claims. But the people who believe this garbage are out there, and I worry about what they might do, aside from carving a B in their own faces.

(Links added.)

Well, it's true. I do worry about the people who believe the garbage. I worry that the two young neo-Nazis who were recently arrested for an ill-conceived plot to kill Obama and 102 other people aren't the only members of the lunatic fringe who will be gunning for the new President and his supporters if Obama is elected.

But enough about them. Fueled by all the news items and those emails F. -- a perfectly nice former co-worker of mine, who supports cancer awareness and humane treatment of animals -- continues to send me, I tend to focus too much on the low information voters and bigots. What about everyone else? What about the positive, rational reasons for voting for McCain or Obama?



I don't know for sure, and to be honest it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But I imagine it's perfectly possible to vote for John McCain for reasons that aren't based on lies or innuendo. You may believe that the war in Iraq is being won, and will be won if John McCain is allowed to manage it. You may believe that he has a plan for capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, which he's not disclosing for security reasons. You may feel that McCain's approach to foreign policy is better than Barack Obama's, by dint of greater experience and toughness. You may believe that we need a saber rattler in the White House, not someone who prefers diplomacy and direct talks, who, to paraphrase McCain's hero Teddy Roosevelt, speaks softly and carries a big stick. Maybe you don't believe that Obama even carries a stick.

Similarly, you may know perfectly well what the factual differences are between John McCain's economic policies and Barack Obama's, and still prefer McCain's. Despite evidence to the contrary, you may believe that the economy needs to be rescued from the top down rather than from the bottom up, with people who earn over $250,000 a year getting the bulk of the tax breaks rather than being made to pay what they were paying the day George W. Bush took office.

But here is what I believe, based on extensive reading, and listening to quite a few talking heads from both sides of the aisle. John McCain has wrong-headed ideas on both foreign policy and the economy that are extremely similar to the ones that got us into the predicament we're in now. He has not offered one new idea with a reasonable chance of doing any good, and several that are likely to cause further harm. He has chosen a running mate who believes that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man, who condones witch-hunting, who uses Alaska resources for her personal ends, who lies to the public frequently and without shame, whose husband belonged to a secessionist party for years, and who apparently cannot string two coherent sentences together without a TelePrompter. If that's not sufficient evidence of McCain's poor judgment in selecting her, add in his frequent lies about his opponent's policies, personal attacks based on tenuous relationships, baseless innuendo about socialism and other-ness, and massive hypocrisy in constantly accusing Obama and company of doing the same things he and his campaign do to a far greater degree. This is a man I've voted for for Senator, because I used to believe that even if his ideas were mostly wrong, at least he was a man of integrity. I was mistaken.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has a keen intelligence, an outstanding education, a steady temperament, a willingness to listen to Republicans and well as Democrats, compassion, fair-mindedness, charisma, eloquence and, most of all, policies and plans that will help the country and the world. With all due respect to Hillary Clinton, there is only one candidate this year, of any race or gender, with such a potent combination of assets. And a week from now, barring a major disaster or even more massive election-tampering than we've seen so far, he'll be the President-Elect.

But if you want to vote for John McCain for rational reasons, based on his policies, his history and his character, you go ahead and do that. That's how democracy is supposed to work.

Karen

Patterns of Force: Has McCain Lost Control?

There's an episode of the original series of Star Trek called "Patterns of Force." It's not in the upper echelon of good Star Trek stories, but rather one of Gene Roddenberry's sometimes awkward attempts at social commentary. But that's not important right now. The premise was this: the Enterprise finds a missing historian on a planet that's literally turned into a planet of Nazis, complete with SS and Gestapo, bent on exterminating the rather peaceful inhabitants of the next planet over. The historian, John Gill, tried to solve the planet's problems by setting up an "efficient" government modeled on Nazi Germany, setting himself up as Fuhrer, the better to guide and help them. Gill left out the religious/ethnic scapegoating from his recreation, but the Deputy Fuhrer rectified this omission when he took over behind the scenes. By the time Kirk and Co. arrive, Gill is a figurehead, a drugged up talking head manipulated by the hatemongers in his government.

There's also at least one Doctor Who story (Vengeance on Varos, perhaps?) with a similar dynamic, the apparent leader of a totalitarian regime who is actually just another victim of the vicious people pulling his strings.

Now, I don't mean to remotely imply that there is a close parallel with either of these stories in current American politics. But as I ponder recent developments at the rallies of John McCain and Sarah Palin, I find myself wondering how much control McCain is exerting over his own campaign. Does he really "approve this message" when an ad strays far from factual territory into character assassination? Does he approve Palin's attempts to paint Barack Obama as the scary unAmerican, one of Them, possibly a terrorist himself (although Palin never quite says this)? Does he approve of supporters' yells - unanswered until Friday - that Obama is a traitor and a terrorist, so "off with his head"?

For most of this week, it looked as though McCain approved all of the above, or at least didn't object enough to say anything to the contrary. Then on Friday, he finally said something. When McCain volunteer Gayle Quinnell, called Obama "an Arab," McCain said, "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues."

Reports differ on whether Quinnell called him an Arab or an Arab terrorist; the microphone only picked up "Arab" as McCain took the mike from her. But he knew what she meant. After all, the emails and other extremist hatemongering propaganda about Obama being a secret Muslim terrorist, possibly even the Antichrist, have been making the rounds for quite some time. McCain did not refute the idea that an "Arab" is inherently evil; he merely asserted that Obama is a "decent family man" and a "citizen." At another point in the rally he assured a father-to-be that he did not need to be afraid of an Obama presidency. For these reasonable, truthful remarks amid the attacks on Obama's character, McCain was booed by the crowd.

Nor was Quinnell herself convinced by McCain's attempt to defuse the paranoid hatemongering. Afterward she told reporters that she had been mailing out "information" about Obama as a Muslim terrorist at her own expense to hundreds of people randomly selected in the phone book.

Noah Kunin: You called him an Arab terrorist? Is that correct? Why do you think he is an Arab?

Quinnell Because his dad is. If you… I’ll send you the paper.

Female reporter: His dad is Muslim. His dad was Muslim. Barack Obama has never been a Muslim.

Quinnell: No but he’s….

Dana Bash of CNN: He’s a Christian.

Quinnell: He’s not an Arab either, he’s a--

Bash: His father was Muslim, and he’s a Christian.

Quinnell: Yeah , but he’s still got Muslim in him. So that’s still part of him. I got all the stuff from the library and I could send you all kinds of stuff on him. In fact….

Bash: What did you think about McCain said? He said he’s a decent person.

Quinnell: Well he did have didn’t have (unintelligible) I think McCain wanted to (unintelligible) I don’t think he wanted to say anything against him. You know he didn’t want to cut him down. That was my way of thinking. I don’t think he wanted to cut him down. So he just kind of brushed me off.

Reporter: Plus he criticizes Barack Obama plenty himself, so why wouldn’t he do it now?

Quinnell: Well I probably brought up something that he didn’t want to talk about.

Reporter: Do you think John McCain thinks that he’s Arab? Do you think he knows this stuff that you’re saying you know is fact?

Quinnell: I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want to bring it up then. I don’t know why. Is there some way I can get to you more information?

As deluded xenophobes continued to spread lies about Obama beyond what McCain himself would condone, Obama himself called for an end to the divisiveness without directly criticizing the scary people who called for Obama's blood:

"In the last couple of days we have seen a barrage of nasty insinuations and attacks and I am sure we will see much more over the next 25 days.... It's easy to rile up a crowd by stoking anger and division. But that is not what we need now in the United States, the times are too serious."

He also said,

“I want to acknowledge that Sen. McCain tried to tone down the rhetoric yesterday, and I appreciated his reminder that we can disagree while still being respectful of each other,” he said at a rally in north Philadelphia. McCain, he said, “has served this country with honor and he deserves our thanks for that.”

And the McCain camp's response to Obama's rather mild rebuke?

“Barack Obama’s assault on our supporters is insulting and unsurprising,” McCain senior adviser Nicolle Wallace said in a statement, “These are the same people Obama called ‘bitter’ and attacked for ‘clinging to guns’ and faith. He fails to understand that people are angry at corrupt practices in Washington and Wall Street and he fails to understand that America’s working families are not ‘clinging’ to anything other than the sincere hope that Washington will be reformed from top to bottom.”

A McCain spokesman also attacked Obama. “Barack Obama’s attacks on Americans who support John McCain reveal far more about him than they do about John McCain. It is clear that Barack Obama just doesn’t understand regular people and the issues they care about,” said Brian Rogers.

Somehow I don't think that's going to dial down the hate and paranoia on the part of supporters.

So the question remains: is John McCain in control of his campaign at this point? He seems to have attempted a measure of it on Friday, but failed to keep either his campaign staff or his supporters from undercutting his words. At this point I have no idea whether any portion of the old image of McCain as an honorable man was ever true but I'd like to think that the spark of decency she showed on Friday was genuine. He needs to fan that flame, and use it to combat the very different fires being set in his name.

Karen

Looking for Skeletons in the Candidates' Past

Tonight I'm just going to do a quick entry, I hope, because I want to visit everyone's blogs on this week's Round Robin Photo Challenge. I'm also weeks behind on making the rounds on the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, but that will have to wait for tomorrow. I'm way behind on things today for two reasons:

1. John lured me to the tv twice today, with a classic Route 66 episode guest starring Martin Sheen and James Caan, and with new episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

2. This Presidential Election cycle is turning me into a hardcore political junkie, probably for the first time in my life.

Late last night, say from 2 AM to 4 AM, I wrote an entry on my Obama blog called "They Also Serve Who Only Scan and Copy-Paste." Don't bother to look for it; it's not there, although I may reuse that title sometime soon. The article disappeared into the ether due to site maintenance, and my forgetting to copy the piece before attempting to post. It was about the fact that the Obama buttons I designed have been blowing out the door of the campaign office, especially the Barkers for Obama ones. They made nearly 1,000 buttons between Tuesday and Friday, and although not all of them were my designs they've probably sold hundreds of them. Last night, on request, I added to the range with these:











And, just for you, Bea:



This afternoon, the guy in charge of the campaign office here asked me to make him a Barkers design with his dog pictured instead of one of mine. "Sure!" I said. And a family asked me to do a larger version of the Kids one so they can have a T-shirt made.

Cayenne wears a Barkers button with her own likeness.

Meanwhile, I myself still only have the defective buttons I made a few days ago, plus one Barkers and one Bloggers. I went down there today hoping to make more Barkers and Cool Cats and the Weekend Assignment designs, but there were still no Barkers on hand, the only Cool Cats were a few of the wrong cat, and I couldn;t work the circle cutter. I'm half convinced that the key to competent button making is to cut a goo circle on the crimble (printed design). There was no one down there today to help me with the mechanics of button making, so I have to put off my own button order until Monday.

The other political stuff of the day wasn't local. Over on the email account for mavarin@com, surrounded by nonsense characters, debt reduction come-ons and endless sex-oriented spam, I came across one with the subject line "7 Reasons Why Barack Obama is Not a Christian." The sender, a group called Christian Response, was offering to send out a DVD supposedly offering evidence for their spurious accusation. I didn't read the toxic email all the way through, but I did see that it ended with something like, "Who are you going to believe, Barack Obama or Jesus Christ?"

In accordance with my current policy on libelous spam, I emailed them back:

From: Karen @ thatword.com
To: Christian Response
Subject: Re: 7 Reasons Why Barack Obama is Not a Christian

You people should be ashamed of yourselves. This lie has been thoroughly debunked, as you well know:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/church.asp
http://www.newsweek.com/id/145971
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/sliming_obama.html
http://www.factcheck.org/specialreports/that_chain_e-mail_your_friend_sent_to.html

As a Christian who is webmaster for a mainstream church, I am frankly appalled that some self-proclaimed Christians place one or two issues that Jesus never spoke about ahead of His mandates to love your neighbor, love your enemy, be a good steward, care for the poor and be pure of heart. Your willingness to lie and cheat in order to mislead Christians into voting against Obama on the basis of false information is an affront to everything Jesus stood for - and still does.

Oh, and by the way, take me off your mailing list. It will be one less odious spam to delete.

Karen

I have no illusions that I will sway anyone at the other end of that email, but I had to make a stand. That includes publicizing such dirty tricks here and on the Obama blog.

The political news of the day offered some perspective on this smear attempt. The New York Times ran a front page article on Barack Obama's alleged link to former Weathermen bomber William Ayers, only to conclude that they are mere acquaintances. It is, Media Matters notes, "at least the 18th Times article this year mentioning that association." Media Matters goes on to say that the same person quoted about Ayers and Obama, Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman, also called Watergate conspirator G.Gordon Liddy "McCain's "own Bill Ayers" - and yet the New York Times has never mentioned the latter connection. Amusingly, this is the same New York Times that the McCain campaign accused of being "in the tank" for Obama a week or so ago. (Update: McCain also has been friends with a 1960s anti-war radical, the late David Ifshin, who was making noise and shutting down campus at Syracuse University when I was a kid and my dad was a dean at S.U.. Ifshin didn't bomb anything, but he did broadcast anti-American war machine rhetoric on Hanoi radio.)

Meanwhile, there are reports every day about Troopergate and other scandals and abuses of power by Sarah Palin as Wasilla mayor and Alaska governor. There are legitimate concerns being raised about John McCain's health, about unreported "per diems" on Palin's taxes, and about unreported gambling income and losses on McCain's.

And there's this, which if it holds up factually and gains traction in the media, will probably serve as the final nail in McCain's political coffin: Rolling Stone is publishing a major, major article on John McCain in its October 16th issue. It's online now:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain

The article documents his unprincipled, hotheaded, self-serving behavior throughout his entire career, from his school days as the arrogant, hotheaded son and grandson of four star generals through his behavior this year. Using lots of interviews and quotes from McCain himself, it paits a very dark picture of the man, much more in line with what we've seen from him over the last several months that that of the principled moderate and proponent of "straight talk" that many believed him to be. That (along with the "Maverick" label) appears now to have been a calculated smokescreen, a way to rebrand himself after the Keating 5 scandal and attract favorable press attention as a route to power. (Update: Obama's campaign has now brought up the Keating 5 scandal in a major way, pointing out its relevance to the current economic crisis. McCain's people are now scrambling to counter this with feeble denials to well-documented fact.)



As I read the Rolling Stone piece and quite a few other articles about McCain and Palin, I am led to an inescapable conclusion. The difference between digging up skeletons in McCain's and Palin's pasts and doing the same to Obama - as the Republicans are trying desperately to do now - is that McCain's skeletons are real. Obama's are the product of racist, paranoid, opportunistic, xenophobic fantasy. No matter that he's a Christian - call him a Muslim anyway, and the rubes will believe it. Shake people up with talk of "socialism" when Obama calls for universal health insurance, and hope that nobody notices that Ronald Reagan said the same thing about Medicare in a scaremongering LP that Palin quoted from in Thursday's debate. Invent or play up spurious connections between Obama and terrorists and lobbyists, and hope nobody listens when the media point out McCain's many lobbyists on staff and Palin's former connection with an indicted Senator. Keep the narrative going on Fox News, National Review Online and in viral emails, and above all, train your supporters to assume that anything the rest of the media may say is a liberal elite media lie.

Only it's not going to work any more. A few people will always be fooled, but the rest of us can see which skeletons are real, and which are made of cardboard.

Karen

P.S. So much for "just a quick entry!"