McCain team accused of playing the race card as tone of campaign darkens

An attempt in recent days by John McCain's campaign to shift the focus of the presidential election away from the economy and towards the past associations of Barack Obama has led to criticisms from some Democrats and sections of the media that Republicans are trying to stir up racial prejudice in an attempt to halt Obama's momentum.

With McCain currently trailing Obama by alarming margins in opinion polls and with Americans both blaming the Republicans for the current economic crisis and trusting Obama more to fix it (see polls in my article last week), it was perhaps no surprise to hear senior McCain adviser Greg Stimple say on Saturday that his campaign team would be "looking for a very aggressive last 30 days. We are looking to turn the page on the financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for America."

The first sign of this new emphasis on portraying Obama as "agressively liberal" and "risky for America" could be seen on Saturday when McCain's running mate Sarah Palin began using her campaign stump speeches to attack Obama's past links to Bill Ayers, a "political radical" or "unrepentant terrorist" (depending on which TV network you watch) who attempted to bomb the Pentagon and US Capitol in the early 1970s.

Ayers, now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois in Chicago, held an informal gathering for prominent local liberals at his home in 1995 , at which Alice Palmer announced that she be would stepping down from the state senate and nominated Obama as her preferred successor. Between 1995 and 2002 Obama and Ayers also served together on the board of two charities (one concerned with education reform, the other an anti-poverty initiative) . Obama has described Ayers as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know" while his his chief strategist David Axelrod has said "they know each other, as anyone (would) whose kids go to school together." An investigation in Saturday's New York Times concluded:

"A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers."

Referring to both the meeting held at Ayers' home and to the New York Times article, Palin made the following comments at events in Colorado and California on Saturday:

"I was reading my copy of today’s New York Times and I was really interested to read about Barack’s friends from Chicago. Turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol.’ These are the same guys who think patriotism is paying higher taxes. This is not a man who sees America as you and I do - as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country. This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change anyone can believe in - not my kids and not your kids. The only man who can take on Washington is John McCain.

Twice this week, at rallies in Florida and Pennsylvania, warm up speakers for McCain and Palin have referred to Obama using his middle name Hussein, actions which were later repudiated as "inapproriate rhetoric" by a McCain spokesperson. However with Palin attempting to resuscitate the Reverend Wright controversy in an interview on Sunday, McCain now asking crowds at events "who is the real Barack Obama?" and his wife Cindy telling a rally on Thursday that Obama's vote against a military funding bill "sent a cold chill" through her body, there is no doubt that the tone and mood at Republic rallies has changed. According to The Washington Post, as Palin criticised the national media during a speech in Clearwater, Florida on Tuesday an African-American TV sound man was racially abused by a member of the crowd and then told to "sit down, boy." Later when Palin described Obama's links to Ayers a shout of "kill him!" was heard from the audience. Fox News' Carl Cameron yesterday described the change:

"In recent days, when Barack Obama's name is mentioned, it has gone from boos and hissing to actual chants and calls of 'traitor', 'criminal' and even 'terrorist'. The McCain campaign say that don't condone it, don't want to see it happen but it's happening more and more every day."

While Obama has dismissed the new Republican attacks as an attempt to distract the electorate from the economic crisis, his running mate Joe Biden has gone further, accusing Republicans of making the "most outrageous inferences" and "injecting fear and loathing into the campaign," and desrcibing their actions as "mildly dangerous."

Gary Meeks and Ed Towns, two black Democratic congressmen from New York, have even explicictly accused the McCain campaign of racism. Referreing to Palin's speech on Saturday, Meeks said, “He’s ‘not one of us'? That’s racial. That’s fear. They know they can’t win on the issues, so the last resort they have is race and fear." Towns concurred : "Racism is alive and well in this country, and McCain and Palin are trying to appeal to that and it’s unfortunate." A strongly worded editorial in Thursday's New York Times echoed this sentiment, accusing McCain and Palin of running "one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember" and claiming that "they have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia."

The introduction of the race question into the campaign is potentially damaging not just for Barack Obama but also for Amercian society itself. There is already a risk that if Obama maintains a sizable lead in the polls but still loses to McCain on November 4th his defeat will be blamed on the Bradley Effect, a theory that black politicians perform better in opinion polls than on election day because some white voters hide their racial prejudices when speaking to pollsters. If a scenario develops where white racism is believed to have determined the outcome of the presidential election, the damage to race realtions in the United States could be profound. Up until this point, the race issue has remained largely hidden beneath the water. History will not be kind to John McCain if it deems him the man responsible for bringing it to the surface.