McCain's Divisive Campaign

Senator McCain pandered so mercilessly to Republican base voters that he treated them with contempt. Sarah Palin’s attacks on Barack Obama for supposed associations with Rashid Khalidi, who she claimed was a former spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was a last-ditch attempt to discredit Obama and derail his campaign. It demonstrated that the McCain campaign knew it faced defeat on election day. It showed that the campaign failed to understand that a change election necessitates appealing to the center, not the base. It also exhibited a condescending attitude toward average Republican voters.

At some point it ceased being the average Republican that the centrist senator was trying to appeal to, but to the cartoon Republican−the white, uneducated, gun-totin’ working class rural voter, the Republican that exists only within the cynical landscape of the McCain campaign. The veteran senator was seeking to appeal to the very worst of Republican instincts and America’s rather more sophisticated electorate expressed its dissatisfaction at the ballot box.

Republican voters were rightly appalled that their representatives regarded them with such contempt. Americans turn a blind eye when the Saudi royal family berates the United States for her stance toward the Palestinians and for her alliance with Israel. We might decry Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s outlandish rhetoric but we understand one important thing−all politics, as long term House Speaker Tip O’Neill once declared, is local.

When we accept this type of rhetoric as inevitable in another domestic political setting, however, there is an implicit assumption that we are better than that. Our politicians do not need to revert to hateful, nationalist rhetoric because we are not hateful and nationalistic, and because our society has progressed beyond all that. That type of politics is neither desirable nor necessary in pluralist America.

So what do we make of the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama for his connections to sixties domestic terrorist Bill Ayres and Rashid Khalidi? What exactly was the McCain camp trying to imply when it revealed that Barack Obama was reading Fareed Zakaria’s The Post American World? Did the continued reference to Obama being a socialist not sound eerily like McCarthyism? And what of the Country First banner the campaign was flying beneath?

John McCain relied on Republican voters to forget their reservations about their candidate and his dubious commitment to their conservative principles and on independents to enter the polling booths with a subconscious sense of fear. He hoped that the cynical selection of a deeply unqualified VP nominee would help him attract a reluctant base and that her ugly attacks on Obama would resonate with undecided voters concerned about the future.

The McCain campaign tried to make this past election a choice between cartoon Republicans and cartoon Democrats. It was a stark and ugly choice. It was a premise that treated the public as cardboard cutouts, as caricatures. It cast America not as a sophisticated, pluralist country with an eclectic mix of urban and rural, white and black, immigrant and native, religious and secular, but as a backwater of distrust and xenophobia.

Republican voters rejected John McCain’s bid to become America’s 44th president. Not because he did not reflect their values, not because he would not have made a worthy president, and not because he represented four more years of failed Bush policies. But because he campaigned in such a way that treated normal, intelligent Republican voters with contempt. Independents also rejected McCain because he was, as Barack Obama said, ‘an honorable man running a dishonorable campaign,’ one that sought victory by reminding Americans not of those things that bind them, but of those things that divide them. An Obama victory proved to the McCain camp that the American polity−and American society−is far too pluralist and sophisticated for the regrettable ‘domestic consumption only’ politics of the Ahmadinejad variety.