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The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama

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By FRANK RICH
Published: October 11, 2008

IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back
when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious
presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about
Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

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 Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich

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Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let
alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have
stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with
Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave
Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate
in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first
Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama
reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to
his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that
the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium
speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like
success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of

“Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as
well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually
something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable
twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to
bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor,
even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s
childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike
have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform.
But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game,
however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe
the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that
the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political
equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-
like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric,
especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his
political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is
“palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not
a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a
wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of
American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?”
it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical
conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further
by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates
introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at
once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail
blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era
variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-

association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential
killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s
friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last
week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident
from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even

potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We
all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking
the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years

ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility
for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling
here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their
refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it
with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly
right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American
politician who might be vice president of the United States would not
just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to
pour gas on the fires.

It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly

disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein
Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either
backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his
opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate
disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era
flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack
Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.

From the start, there have always been two separate but equal
questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in
America to prevent a black man from being elected president no
matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out
on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous
answer to the second: Yes.

McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as

Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican
convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an
“only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that
the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other
than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked
for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle
where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were
slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s

convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-
town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community
organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst
columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical
excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and
murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was
“regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s,
Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the
Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises
before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice
president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s
been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign.
Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan —
or William Ayers — in Denver.

The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it
ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention,
when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the
mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a
legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic
leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had
no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that
could dominate the ad’s visuals.
There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to
these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor,
senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin
can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America”
without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state
whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-
third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at
McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee
Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a
campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was
standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only
apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.

Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been
skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic)
that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt.
Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are
riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy.
Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a
reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic
meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that
changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate
stage.

To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On
July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial
politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that
strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell
“between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the
implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in
North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate,
Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.

But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final
say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain
campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning
and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The
onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the
dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.