Hate Rhetoric and the McCain Campaign

An interesting op-ed from the Washington Post by E.J. Dionne ("Hoover vs. Roosevelt") compares Obama’s message to that of Roosevelt (Hope) and McCain’s to Hoover (Fear) in the election of 1932. Obama has not quite inspired any “fireside chat” comfort for me (in fact neither candidate has shown convincingly to have picked up on the import of the situation at hand), but the McCain campaign has taken a marked turn in rhetoric toward hate, that the right-wing crowds (mobs?) have amplified with boos and chants of “no-Bama.” Whatever the right feels about Obama, in 3 months, he might well be sworn in as President of the United States, in which case the conversation will have to shift back to policy and away from the Senator’s middle name in order for the right to maintain any integrity and for our democratic system to move forward as a people.

The beauty of democracy is in its institutionalization of regular peaceful revolution. Hate speech like that which we have seen gnaws at the peaceful nature of democracy, and the battle of passions that it provokes lurks right below the surface of violence -- a latent shadow of the force of arms. McCain’s campaign has begun to undermine the peaceful transition that our nation must undergo in a matter of weeks. Obama is and will be a respectable leader, and the authority he inspires among his fans and followers is both admirable and powerful. His ideas may be grounded in a philosophy and ideology that directly challenges Republican ideals, but they are grounded and, though different, they are not necessarily wrong.

Hannah Arednt writes in The Human Condition that forgiveness paves the way for progress. In a sense, the right will have to forgive Obama for what he represents. They will not have to agree with him and absolutely should not blindly go along with him, but they will have to forgive and respect him as the leader of our nation so that the wounds of an election can heal and so that our nation stands on a foundation (set by its people) of reason and not blind passion. The next president takes the reins of two wars and a financial melt-down. These tribulations will require unity and cooperation from both sides of the spectrum. The harsh notes of “No-Bama” must cede to harmonious “U.S.A., U.S.A.” or else doom and chaos will come in through the back door to undermine U.S. prosperity.

I have great respect for John McCain, and have long been one of the infamous “fence-sitters” in this election, but the tone the McCain side has taken casts a shadow on many of the positive policy aspects of his campaign. David Brooks recently wrote a sort of eulogy for the old McCain, if not an apology for the new McCain (“Thinking about McCain”). I read it and said to myself, “That's the guy I like, where’d he go?”

From the beginning of this campaign, even back when McCain began shoring up support with company like Falwell, I have wondered what McCain really seeks to gain from this shape-shifting dance. Maybe he had to move right to secure the Republican nomination, but why keep moving even farther right, as the selection of Sarah Palin represents, once he did?

McCain’s appeal was always to moderates like me. There’s an economic theory developed by Harold Hotelling which represents buyers as dispersed along a linear path. The example uses swimmers along a beach, but let’s analogize it to voters lined up on the political spectrum from left to right. Two ice cream vendors (candidates) are trying to decide where to locate on the beach. Given that swimmers go to whichever ice cream vendor is closest, Hotelling’s theory is that two ice cream vendors will both locate in the middle, equidistant from both ends of the beach. If one vendor instead stayed farther south, the other would move south too, keeping her old customers to the north while capturing even more of the market farther south. We see that Obama was pretty well established to the left, but he has adapted his image to move closer to the middle to start in order to capture some of the moderates. McCain has taken the opposite approach. He was close to the middle, right where he should want to be, but keeps drifting to the right, forfeiting voters in the middle who suddenly find Obama closer to their ideologies than McCain.

To illustrate a little more simplistically, Voters to the far right will always always vote for McCain over Obama, so why adapt your campaign to that group? Shift to the middle and capture the entire right and whatever marginal ground Obama leaves uncovered by staying to the left. In contrast, McCain has retreated from the middle to fortify himself in the castle on the right, which leaves the plains in between undefended and open for the taking. Obama is selling more ice cream, and McCain has resorted to fussing and shouting. I don’t want to buy ice cream from the angry old man at the far end of the beach either.

So that’s a brief tangent on what McCain should have done to win. Unfortunately for McCain, winning is moving farther out of the picture, and now McCain’s patriotic duty should be to stop burning bridges and keep in tact the means for forgiveness and democratic reconciliation. Once the election is over, the nation must return to business as usual, and those angry shouting people in the crowd aren’t going to make that so easy. I hate to do it, but must I remind that race is still a factor in this election. See Kristof’s article “Racism without Racists”. While I have no doubt (well, less doubt – the middle name thing bugs me. See Hosseini "McCain and Palin are Playing with Fire") that McCain can separate his political evocation of hate from any racial dimensions of the campaign, I’m not so sure that his audience can. Our nation has much more at stake than political reconciliation after this election. The true test and triumph in the aftermath of the election, no matter who wins, will be untying race-related emotions from political emotions, and honestly, treating the results like any other W.A.S.P. v. W.A.S.P. election. I say this because the day that the victory or defeat of a black man or woman has absolutely no significance on a racial dimension (as I hope would be the case for a modern-day Catholic candidate) will represent the true triumph of racial equality. It will be far easier to untie those emotions after the election if the McCain campaign would stop putting the bellows to the fire of emotion right now.

I think that our nation stands to come out of this election with a very strong president no matter which way the vote goes. My hope is that we will also come out as a strong and respectable electorate. I can’t place blame squarely on the McCain campaign (The Obama campaign has run its fair share of negative ads), but I think that, of late, McCain's campaign has done more to fuel the fire than rise above it. He is scaring my vote away, and he threatens to do much worse, while gaining no advantage that I can see for himself. John McCain, please stop playing with our emotions.