Last week hysteria and raw fear erupted among McCain supporters. Voices were heard at rallies shouting, “Terrorist!” “Traitor!” and even, “Kill him!” A sheriff in uniform at a Florida rally brayed repeatedly about “Barack Hussein Obama.” (Anyone remember the last time the GOP candidate was referred to by his full name, John Sidney McCain?) Immediately the media heaped shame upon the McCain campaign for the crowd’s wrath. At some point, it became too much for McCain himself, whose running mate jeers Obama for “palling around with terrorists.” In response to a woman at a Minnesota rally who stood and said, "I don't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's an Arab," McCain shook his head, "No ma'am, no ma'am, he’s not,” he replied. “He’s a decent family man...[a] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. That's what this campaign is all about."

In the way that news is digested and forgotten in a shockingly brief moment, the media moved on. A panel of African-American journalists and academics discussing race and the campaign at a Time/CNN political conference spoke little about the fury from only a week earlier.

It’s comforting to dismiss verbal expressions of violence as the ranting of a few fringe individuals. Sadly, however, the world knows it only takes one who believes the mainstream has validated his thinking to turn harmful words into deadly action. After the 1995 assassination of Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Avi’s Kings of Israel Square, hundreds of articles and reports examined the incendiary atmosphere before the murder.

The road to Rabin’s assassination began as it usually does in the margins of society. Extreme right-wing groups condemned Rabin’s role in the Oslo Peace Accords with Yassar Arafat as a supreme betrayal, giving holy land to terrorists. Posters depicting Rabin as a Nazi, or effigies of him in SS uniform, appeared at rallies for “mainstream” politicians, among them Benjamin Nethanyu and Ariel Sharon, who ignored cries of “traitor!” Such charges seeped into the mainstream discussion and media. After Rabin’s death, journalists, government officials and others pondered whether they shared in the creation of an environment that allowed Rabin’s killer–who told the court Rabin wanted to “give our country to the Arabs” – to believe that his radical thinking was legitimized because it wasn’t condemned.

Should the expressions of hate at recent McCain/Palin rallies be written off as marginal and irrelevant? Certainly race is often interjected in presidential campaigns. Remember Willie Horton? “Willie Horton was one ad in a campaign,” says Matt Taibbi, political writer for Rolling Stone and author of The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire. “This is four or five different avenues of attacks in the last few weeks of a campaign season. It’s totally immoral and it’s conscious.”

The attacks don’t need to be inherently anti-black, just anti-Other, whether based on race, gender, religion or culture. “The technique these people use is to dehumanize the opponent and his or her followers,” Taibbi says. “The softest example is ‘liberal,’ but politicians are more than willing to use ‘terrorist,’ ‘traitor,’ ‘communist,’ all words the GOP has used this election. You repeat them enough, people get to a place intellectually where they don’t see the other side as fully human – and someone might do something about it. When Palin says, ‘he doesn’t see America like you and I do,’ her speechwriters know they’re playing a dangerous game, but they hope nothing happens.”

The U.S. Secret Service considers the threatening language seriously enough to announce if the individual is found who yelled “Kill him!’ at a Palin rally in Scranton, PA, the agency will hand him or her over to federal prosecutors. (Senator Obama was assigned a secret service detail earlier than any other presidential candidate in history.) After the rally, CNN contributor David Gergen warned, "There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we're not far from that…it’s really imperative that the candidates try to calm people down."

At another rally McCain declared, “I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments, I will respect him.” When the audience began to boo, he kept talking: “I want everyone to be respectful and let’s make sure we are, because that’s the way politics should be conducted in America." At which point, the New York Times reported, the crowd applauded.

“I think deep down John McCain is turned off by this kind of politics,” Taibbi says. “He was a victim of it himself in 2000 when people said his Bangladeshi-born adopted daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. I think if he weren’t running for president, he wouldn’t do this. Now he has surrogates do it for him.”
Yet Taibbi sees an optimistic outcome if Obama wins. “The current attacks are straight forward, not coded or veiled; this time they’re questioning directly, are you ready to have a black president? And if we find a large majority of people say yes, it will be the death knell to this kind of politics. It’s ugly now because it worked before, but if the numbers don’t turn out to help their cause, why would anyone do it ever again?”

Past In Depth Articles
Hate Versus Hope
Hate Groups' New Target: McCain