Back in 2003, when John McCain was on his book tour, he stood up at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver and told the audience, "There is absolutely nothing Karl Rove will stop at to hold power, and George Bush will let him." McCain was right. And it turned out that McCain was ultimately willing to embrace Bush and Rove in 2004 to pave the way for his own rise to power. A few months ago, McCain hired Rove's hit squad to run his own campaign, and yesterday he loosed his own pit bull, Sarah Palin, to show that there was a lesson Rove taught in 2000 that McCain remembered and was ready to take advantage of.
Palin said she was taking the gloves off, but what she really meant was launching what looks to be one of the most viciously dirty months in American politics. She accused Obama of "palling around" with terrorists," because he served on a non-profit board run by the utterly establishment Annenberg Foundation that happened to include a former 60s radical, Bill Ayers.
Let's be clear -- when you see "fact-check" analyses finding errors in the claims by both campaigns, they are not all equivalent. When McCain says that Obama wants to raise taxes on folks that he would actually protect, or when Obama claims that McCain actually wants to treat health care just like Wall Street, when McCain was only referring to allowing interstate competition, the media ought to call the candidates on their exaggerations or distortions. But those kinds of claims are politics as usual, of which we have plenty this year. We should be wary, and perhaps disappointed, but not outraged.
But when McCain asserted earlier that Obama wanted to teach sex education to six year olds, or when Palin says Obama "pals around with terrorists" those are vicious smears -- not the exaggerations of politics as usual. These tactics weren't really invented by Lee Atwater when he used Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis in 1988 -- they go back in modern American politics at least to Joe McCarthy. (My first political memory was my parents' outrage in Maryland when McCarthy doctored a photo of Democratic Senator Millard Tydings standing next to the head of the U.S. Communist Party. Today, with Photoshop, doctored photos don't work, because everyone knows they are fake -- so Palin uses the New York Times to credential her smear.) But Atwater, and later Rove, perfected them, and now McCain has shown, decisively, that he too will stop at nothing to gain power. With perfect timing, Rolling Stone just came out with a searing article that documents that John McCain has never been a true maverick -- he only played on one the Senate floor -- but that his biography, carefully examined, shows a self-centeredness that may explain why he understood Rove so thoroughly back in 2000 -- it takes one to know one.
McCarthy was brought down when his own party finally stood up to him. The shame of modern Republicanism is not that it has spawned Atwater and Rove -- it is that the decent majority of the party is too cowardly to stand and denounce them.
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