The Gospel of John

Why We Should Not Write Off John McCain

It was the most-watched convention season in history.

The thing that irritated me most about the OJ Simpson verdict was the anger and arrogance of whites accusing the black jurors of acquitting Simpson because he was black. I am quite sure Simpson is indeed guilty, but were I sitting on that jury, I’d have acquitted him as well because that’s what the law commands jurors to do when blood evidence is proved to have been tampered with and the prosecution’s main witness is caught lying on the witness stand. Blaming the jurors is unfair and, yes, racist, to conclude black jurors weren’t objective enough, weren’t intelligent enough, to render a reasonable verdict. What most whites I’ve had the misfortune of discussing OJ with seem to want is for the black jurors to disregard the slight-of-hand with the blood vials (one of the lead detectives took vials of blood evidence home overnight, and "blood evidence" recovered from the scene was proved to have been laced with a chemical preservative, suggesting the blood had been planted there after the fact) and Mark Fuhrman’s lies about the “N” word, and find Simpson guilty anyway—which then would have indeed proved the jurors to be dumb, emotional, non-intellectuals.

McCain did speak to the NAACP Wednesday, but it was under the white flag of truce if not outright surrender. He didn't expect to win any votes, he didn't seem to try and win any votes. He bravely crossed the danger waters of icy stares and folded arms, making slight inroads with talk of education reform and public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans. He then took questions after, engaging the audience on a range of issues from child care to economics to the ongoing wars to his early objection to making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. "As much as any other group in America, the NAACP has been at the center of that great and honorable cause," he said. "I'm here today as an admirer and a fellow American, an association that means more to me than any other. I am a candidate for president who seeks your vote and hopes to earn it. But whether or not I win your support, I need your goodwill and counsel. And should I succeed, I'll need it all the more. I have always believed in this country, in a good America, a great America. But I have always known we can build a better America, where no place or person is left without hope or opportunity by the sins of injustice or indifference. It would be among the great privileges of my life to work with you in that cause."

McCain also had wisely kind words for Senator Obama: "Senator Obama talks about making history, and he's made quite a bit of it already. And the way was prepared by this venerable organization and others like it. A few years before the NAACP was founded, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage and an insult in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the nomination of an African-American to be the presidential nominee of his party. Whatever the outcome in November, Senator Obama has achieved a great thing — for himself and for his country — and I thank him for it."

The Chicago Tribune's Washington Bureau reports: McCain surely will get points from some black people for appearing before the convention and engaging participants afterwards by answering a few questions. President Bush stiffed the NAACP for much of his presidency, so McCain succeeded to a large extent by merely showing up. It wasn't the first time he's appeared before a mostly black audience not predisposed to him. For instance, earlier this year McCain visited the Lorraine Motel Civil Rights Museum in Memphis to mark the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. So, yes, he is talking to us. But are we listening?

Kumbya: They would never allow her to pastor.

What bothers me about John McCain,

a candidate I honestly admire, is either he or his advisors seem to think the same thing: blacks are emotional and non-intellectual, cannot be reasoned with, and talking to them will be an expensive waste of time. They need that money to go elsewhere. Even if ceding the black vote makes McCain look racist.

Look, I am not anti-Obama. I’m thrilled about his candidacy. But I want to vote for him, I want us to vote for him, because we believe his ideas are better—not just because he’s black. I find it deeply troubling that most blacks I know can’t name a single policy position of Obama’s. This is where all this flip-flop nonsense is coming from: the charge is sticking because the American people are only now becoming familiar with Obama’s positions. So the McCain campaign runs around saying, “Look! He’s changing his mind! He’s a flip-flopper!” And, despite videotape to the contrary revealing Obama has said months ago precisely the same things he’s saying now, the charge sticks. Why? Because we don’t know a thing about him other than that he’s black. We know his wife’s name. we know he can preach really well and he does the fist bump. We have no idea, none, what Barack Obama’s economic plan is, we have no clue whatsoever what he’s going to do—specifically—about the mortgage meltdown. Most of us know nothing at all about Obama’s vote to pass the FISA amendment or how that wretched piece of legislation harms our privacy rights. Blacks are reluctant to even criticize Obama—as The Reverend Jesse Jackson aptly demonstrated last week by whispering into an open mic, referring to us as "niggers" and remarking how he wants to “Cut [Obama’s] balls off.” Barack Obama is a rock star. Black America is going to support him until they see photos of him cheating on Michelle with a white gay man. We won’t even look in McCain’s direction, and we have adopted the “McBush” mantra: a vote for John McCain is a vote for a third Bush term.

Which is not at all true. Public appearances to the contrary, trust me: John McCain is nothing, I repeat, nothing at all like George Bush. He is, in many, many ways, the Anti-Bush. The problem is, he can’t run an Anti-Bush campaign because he needs those hard-right wingers Bush keeps in his pocket. The big-money corporate hillbillies who, for whatever reason, wanted the most anti-intellectual president in U.S. history (and, per many historians, the worst president in U.S. history). McCain can’t get elected without those people, so he’s running around telling everybody he’s a conservative. Which is a lie. He can’t even say it without looking like he’s about to burst into laughter.

John McCain is a moderate. Write that down someplace. Yes, he has conservative values, but he is not a conservative. He’s a middle of the road type, like George Herbert Walker Bush. He’s been able to get things done by crossing the aisle in Congress and getting real about working with the Democrats—something the president had never managed to do well. As president, John McCain could, quite possibly, be the most effective chief executive this nation has seen in a couple of generations. He knows how to move paper through Capitol Hill. He knows how to deal, how to get things done. But, since his clotheslining by George Bush in 2000 (the Bush campaign got it going that McCain had fathered an illegitimate child. An illegitimate black child, the GOP doing what they do best: divide and frighten us), McCain has stayed politically viable by tucking to the right, embracing his hated enemy Bush, and running around calling himself a conservative.

All of which is measured spoonfuls of politics-as-usual in the name of getting elected. The problem is, by moving right, McCain has sullied his brand name. The McCain of 2000 was a look-you-in-the-eye and give-it-to-you-straight fellow who ducked no questions and took on all comers. He was branded a maverick, and he excited conservative Democrats and independents but scared the devil out of the deep pocket types who preferred the idiot Bush who would either leave them alone or, as he has, enrich them with more tax cuts. A McCain presidency terrified the hard right—as it does now, and McCain’s own party came after him to shut his movement down.

Kumbya: They would never allow her to pastor.

Ironically, the McCain campaign of 2000

looked an awful lot like the Obama campaign of 2008. The main difference, of course, being race: it is the component of Obama’s campaign that can’t be avoided. I mean, if Obama were 100% white or, at least looked white, he’d be running away with this thing. McCain 2000 was all about hope, bristling with great ideas and a positive tone. McCain 2008 is a meandering mess: he can’t get a coherent message out. His message thus far: Don’t Vote For The Black Kid.

I mean, that’s McCain’s entire campaign. Don’t Vote For The Black Kid or the economy will collapse. Don’t Vote For The Black Kid or Iran will nuke us. Don’t Vote For The Black Kid or monkeys will eat your children. So far, he’s running a grass-roots negative campaign. Not full-out scary music negative, but the McCain campaign is clearly mastering how to say “nigger” in 37 politically correct languages. The subtext of his rhetoric is fear. Don’t Vote For The Black Kid. Don’t Vote For The Black Kid who towers over McCain, whose winning smile and fiery oratory enraptures and inspires audiences, whose toned and athletic figure makes McCain look dowdy, and whose steady calm sharply contrasts McCain, a senior citizen who gets cranky if he’s too long without a nap.

McCain is being served up like a sacrificial lamb, the Bob Dole of 2008. The GOP hardly expect him to win, but expects an Obama presidency to be all flash and no substance, thus making their case for 2012 when they run Jeb Bush or somebody. This is why McCain is faltering: I’m not entirely convinced the Republican party actually wants him to win. These ruthless people who totally destroyed Al Gore and John Kerry can’t seem to fashion a message for McCain beyond Don’t Vote For The Black Kid. This pillar of verisimilitude has been left adrift, doddering, snapping at reporters, condescending to the American people while desperately searching for viable for conservative positions that somehow keep him in the GOP column while breaking cleanly from an unpopular president.

John McCain’s campaign is a mess. He had months, I mean, months to move the train forward while Obama duked it out with Hillary Clinton. They achieved nothing. Zero yardage. All McCain can do is mock Obama’s campaign theme, “Change You Can Believe In,” which—somebody should tell him—only reinforces that theme in the mind of the public. Now you’ve got Republican snark ads repeating Obama’s brand, strengthening it in our minds. It’s an idiot’s campaign thus far, run by monkeys and chimps. It’s so bad, it’s got the entire world asking the same question: The McCain of 200? Where’d that guy go?

Blacks & The GOP

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Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the [Republican] convention floor are black, the lowest number since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago. Each night, the overwhelmingly white audience watches a series of white politicians step to the lectern — a visual reminder that no black Republican has served as a governor, U.S. senator or U.S. House member in the past six years. [Washington Post]

"You have plenty of images of committed white people for McCain; you need pictures of committed black people," Krim Ballentine said as he surveyed the Xcel Energy Center. As one of just 36 black delegates, Ballentine stands out. The retired chief deputy U.S. marshal printed up business cards for the occasion calling himself a "Constitution Philosopher" and "The Last Negro." The latter title, the back of his card explains, is in honor of the "First Negro," Othello. "Disrespect is the main ingredient in every act of violence, with racism being the most discernable negative attribute of disrespect," the card reads. Ballentine is a committed McCain supporter, but he won't be voting for him in November. "I'm from the Virgin Islands," he explains; he can't vote in presidential elections. The black man standing nearby won't be voting for McCain, either. "That's my son," Ballentine said. "He's with Republicans for Obama." [National Journal].

Sarah Palin

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In an interview with the Omaha World-Herald, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel (R) suggested that Palin doesn't have the foreign-policy experience to be president. "'She doesn't have any foreign policy credentials," Hagel said in an interview. "You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don't know what you can say. You can't say anything." Hagel continued: "I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, 'I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,'" he said. "That kind of thing is insulting to the American people." And this one: "I think it's a stretch to, in any way, to say that she's got the experience to be president of the United States," Hagel said. —From Mark Murray, NBC News

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

Palin limited her duties further by hiring a deputy administrator to handle much of the town's day-to-day management. Her top achievement as mayor was the construction of an ice rink, a project that landed in the courts and cost the city more than expected.

Arriving in office, Palin herself played down the demands of the job in response to residents who worried that her move to oust veteran officials would leave the town in the lurch. "It's not rocket science," Palin said, according to the town newspaper, the Frontiersman. "It's $6 million and 53 employees." —New York Times, Sept. 13, 2008

Since joining the Republican ticket, Palin has faced questions about whether she is qualified to be vice president or, if necessary, president. In response, the first-term Alaska governor and Sen. John McCain point to the executive qualifications she acquired as Wasilla mayor, a six-year stint from 1996 to 2002 that represents the bulk of her political experience.

Palin says her time as mayor taught her how to be a leader and grounded her in the real needs of voters, and her tenure revealed some of the qualities she would later display as governor: a striving ambition, a willingness to cut loose those perceived as disloyal and a populist brand of social and pro-growth conservatism.

But a visit to this former mining supply post 40 miles north of Anchorage shows the extent to which Palin's mayoralty was also defined by what it did not include. The universe of the mayor of Wasilla is sharply circumscribed even by the standards of small towns, which limited Palin's exposure to issues such as health care, social services, the environment and education.

Firefighting and schools, two of the main elements of local governance, are handled by the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the regional government for a huge swath of central Alaska. The state has jurisdiction over social services and environmental regulations such as stormwater management for building projects.

The mayor oversees a police department created three years before Palin took office; the public works department; the parks and recreation department; a planning office; a library; and a small history museum. Council meetings are in the low-ceilinged basement of the town hall, a former school, and often the only residents who show up to testify are two gadflies. When Palin was mayor, the population was just 5,500. —Washington Post, Sept. 14, 2008

There is no shame in winning an exclusive interview with a reclusive subject, of course, and David Westin is hardly responsible for the McCain campaign’s cynical handling of its Eliza Doolittle problem, but if he had managed his network’s “get” more responsibly he might have expelled its odor of compromise. The occasion of the Alaska governor’s début before the national media called for a lightly edited, extended one-on-one, aired on a single night, so that American voters might assess the candidate’s answers and demeanor in full. Instead, apparently to maximize ratings and branding opportunities, ABC doled out Palin sound bites on six network broadcasts over two days, as well as in supplemental ABC Radio and Web releases. In the end, Westin exploited the Governor’s moose-hunting, baby-juggling appeal as if she were a magnetic contestant on one of the network’s prime-time reality shows—“Extreme Makeover: White House Edition.”

Palin’s answers to Gibson’s questions made it clear that all the briefings and all the cramming that she could absorb in two weeks were not enough to endow her with what her résumé so plainly indicated that she lacked: sufficient exposure to national-security issues to serve as President, should she be required to do so. —The New Yorker, Sept. 15, 2008.

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