Just how ugly is the Sarah Palin road-rage show? Plenty. It brings to mind the hateful, inflammatory rhetoric of Alabama Governor George Wallace who first ran for president in 1968. He represented the worst of the Deep South. Now we have the VP Creep from Up North channeling Wallace's toxic legacy.
She's gone from Maybelline pit bull to Mayberry plain bully, loving every moment in the limelight where she fallaciously and wildly singles out Obama as a primary source of all the pain and frustration that average Americans feel about the way things have turned sour with the culture, economy and Iraq war.
In the soiled Palin playbook, Obama is considered unAmerican, unpatriotic, an outlier, chummy with domestic terrorists. Listening to her, you'd think he should be locked up at Guantanamo instead of heading the Democratic presidential ticket.
Palin steers clear of the N word bomb, but the underlying race-baiting intent of her shtick is all the same. Compare these two sound bites from two different eras:
George Wallace on race: "You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor."
Sarah Palin on Obama: "This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America."
Wallace spoke to the fears of low-income, uneducated whites at a time when Southern black men and women, despite the passage of Civil Right legislation, were strongly discouraged from voting, holding public office, and attending white colleges. So potent and widespread was the segregationist mindset of Wallace supporters that he ended up receiving 10,000,000 votes and winning five Southern states in the 1968 general election.
Palin also speaks to the fears and collective anxiety of the middle and working class who feel left stranded by the road as the government bails out Wall Street bankers and brokers. Those who flock to her rallies mirror her anti-intellectualism. Do you think they really care that she mangles syntax and words in her interviews? She's fluid and fluent with front-porch colloquialisms and partisan gibberish. But she does more than mirror their justifiable concerns. She throws gasoline onto the fire. She excites the crowd, and the crowd excites her. Miss Little Republican Sunshine likes playing to the mob, and the mob responds in kind-- shouting epithets like "traitor" and "terrorist" and "off with his head" at the mere mention of Obama's name. Last week, a Palin political rally owed more in common to a KKK rally than a legitimate campaign stop. She literally let her hair down. Replace the flag pin on Palin's collar with a swastika, and one could hear disturbing echoes of Berlin, circa early 30s, when Germany was also faced with a spiraling. out-of-control weak economy. Jews and communists were the scapegoats then. Obama, liberals, and the collusive media are the villains now. It's class war, now.
Palin is like Pavlov to these Republican bottom-feeders. The mere sight of her on stage, even before she speaks, gets everyone salivating with partisan rancor. Holding onto the last shreds of what might be loosely called a conscience, McCain has belatedly realized that the monster which he had unleashed must be reined in. When the mood became dark and mean at a campaign stop in Wisconsin, McCain reminded listeners that Obama is a decent man. But McCain's tepid protestations is too little, too late. You can't expect your supporters to simply forget that earlier in the week you had called your opponent "That One." Or that your campaign has been running negative ads almost non-stop.
What McCain should do, if he were indeed made of presidential stock, is address the hatefulness and bigotry he carelessly and maliciously brought out of hiding in a major speech, just like Obama took on the issue of race and his past friendship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a speech in Philadelphia in March.
Maybe a McCain mea culpa will happen in the final debate. But you never know which McCain will appear. The past few weeks he's gone through more personality changes than Sybil. Will we see a repentant, apologetic McCain for allowing his campaign to become a massive raw sewage spill? Or will we witness the petulant, hostile, and condescending McNasty who shows annoyance that he is forced to share the stage with Obama?
The whole country is tired and weary from the Presidential Election That Won't End. Nearly a billion dollars will have been shelled out by November 4. And yet, in the end, the deciding factor about the presidential race will be race. Despite the huge policy and character differences between McCain and Obama, many voters will only see the election as Black vs. White.
