John McCain came to Sacramento today. He came for a fundraiser with his fellow fat-cat Republicans. Well-healed lobbyists and donors filed past our little picket line wearing American flag lapel pins and red, white, and blue ties. It seemed that every Republican big shot who populates our beleaguered and bankrupt state capital came out to show their support for their faux "maverick." A small contingent of sign-waving McCain supporters staked out a street corner, while another group of Barack Obama supporters (including myself) set up shop on the opposite corner. We had spirited yelling matches with the McCainophiles while we waived our signs and awaited the candidate's arrival at the Grand Sheraton Hotel in downtown Sacramento.
Some of the McCainiacs carried signs reading: "Christians for McCain" and "McCain Has Cojones" and "Support the Troops" and even "Asians For McCain" and "Hmongs For McCain." The Democrats had signs reading "McCain = Bush III" and "ExxonMcCain '08" and my personal favorite (since I made it): "Bush's Third Term -- 'My Friends.'" I find McCain's constant use of the term "my friends" to be as annoying, if not more so, than Bush's mangling of the word "nucular."
Standing on the corner, holding my anti-McCain sign, (which also featured a string of Bush toilet paper and a large photo of McCain with devil horns), I overheard a conversation going on behind me. A young woman with a pro-McCain placard was in some sort of beef with an Obama supporter. I jumped in saying to her: "You guys have been in power for eight years, can't we try something new?" She responded by insisting that the Republicans have NOT been in power, that the Democrats are the ones who really have all the power, and that Republicans are outsiders. Her bizarre and irrational response took me by surprise and ended our conversation. If a person is so blinded by ideology that she cannot even accept the fact that when Bush leaves office it will mark the end of eight years under a Republican administration -- then what kind of a "discussion" can we have about the "issues" in this election?
The answer is: no discussion at all.
And that's when it dawned on me that there must be millions of my fellow Americans out there who support John McCain for completely irrational reasons. Call them "low information voters" or "no information voters" or whatever you like, but it is the politics of the irrational. And that scares the hell out of me. These people see the last eight years not as a series of unmitigated disasters but as a kind of benevolent rule worthy of continuing for another four years under McCain.
I thought about the politics of the irrational and what that meant for Europe in the 1940s. I thought about the terrible human suffering, the large-scale wars, the mass killings, the genocide, the bombed-out cities, the economic meltdowns and social dislocations that were required to finally vanquish the Far Right in Europe and Japan. I pictured the images of Benito Mussolini dangling upside down from a lamppost in a Milan gas station and Adolf Hitler's charred remains being swept up and taken to Moscow. What kind of death and destruction does the United States have to suffer before people like the woman I spoke to finally figure out that the Far Right has led us to disaster? I mean, let's get real. If McCain is elected president, Randy Scheunemann probably will be his National Security Adviser, and that neo-con nut-bag is cut from the same cloth as John Bolton, Richard Perle, and Dick Cheney. McCain's election will be like a vote of confidence for the neo-conservative project of transforming the world via American military violence. He's sure to launch a war with Iran with disastrous results. Then what?
When McCain's motorcade finally arrived, with the press bus full of his adoring fans in tow, he came over and shook a few hands of his supporters. The gathered Republicans and Democrats had another yelling match, each trying to drown the other out. McCain beat a hasty retreat to the lavish suites high in the Sheraton for his money hustle. He wouldn't hold one of his vaunted "town hall" meetings here in California's capital; he'll make no attempt to see how his "Drill here! Drill now!" mantra plays out in the Golden State.
I may not be a fancy "off the bus" reporter like Mayhill Fowler who chases Obama to Europe and attends $2,300-a-seat fundraisers, digital recorder in hand, hoping to capture gaffe gold and share it with our "good friends" inside the corporate media, but I can report today that McCain received a raucous welcome from a bitterly-divided group of citizens, small in size but alive in spirit. At least there was a street protest against McCain, and by proxy, against the miserable years of the reign of George W. Bush, a reign of corrupt incompetence and warmongering that McCain promises to proudly continue.