Shortly after John McCain’s second debate appearance with Barack Obama on October 7, 2008—a debate most observers thought Obama won handily—Republican officials from his campaign told reporters they intended to mount a more aggressive series of attacks against the Democratic front-runner, who was widening his lead in the polls. According to the Washington Post, they believed that “to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat’s judgment, honesty and personal associations.”
Within days, McCain and his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, began aggressively attacking Obama for his past associations with radical leftist William Ayers and his supposed lack of trustworthiness. Palin accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” while McCain told a crowd, “We’ve all heard what he’s said. But it’s less clear what he’s done, or what he will do.”
The anger stirred up at these rallies became palpable in concrete ways. At one Palin rally, the governor was blaming the media for a series of disastrous television network interviews she had recently given. At one point, supporters began turning on members of the press crew in attendance, even haranguing a camera crew covering the event. One Palin backer turned viciously on a black member of the TV crew and told him, “Sit down, boy!” Attendees at McCain rallies began shouting out “Terrorist!” when Obama’s name was mentioned, and one attendee reportedly shouted out “Kill him!” when Palin was describing Ayers’s ties to Obama (though the Secret Service later insisted the report was unfounded). A camera crew at a Palin rally in Ohio interviewed some of the people attending and came away with a series of chilling remarks:
I’m afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?
He’s related to a known terrorist, for one.
He must support terrorists! You know, uh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. And that to me is Obama.
Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.
I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash . . . because we’re not!
When Obama confronted McCain about this kind of rhetoric at their third and final debate on October 15, McCain demurred that he consistently decried this kind of talk from his campaign, and he defended his supporters “categorically” as “the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation.” Then he went on not only to dredge up the William Ayers association again but also to accuse Obama of aiding and abetting a community-activist group, ACORN—which had been recently in the news over irregularities involving its voter-registration efforts. He said ACORN was “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
Almost overnight, ACORN offices at various locales around the country were vandalized. A community activist in Cleveland received an email warning that she was “going to have her life ended,” and an ACORN staffer in Rhode Island got a phoned-in death threat complete with racial epithets. Voice mails came pouring in, too:
Hi, I was just calling to let you all know that Barack Obama needs to get hung. He’s a fucking nigger, and he’s a piece of shit. You guys are fraudulent, and you need to go to hell. All the niggers on oak trees. They’re gonna get all hung, honeys, they’re gonna get assassinated, they’re gonna get killed.
You liberal idiots. Dumb shits. Welfare bums. You guys just fucking come to our country, consume every natural resource there is, and make a lot of babies. That’s all you guys do. And then suck up the welfare and expect everyone else to pay for your hospital bills for your kids. I just say let your kids die. That’s the best move. Just let your children die. Forget about paying for hospital bills for them. I’m not gonna do it. You guys are lowlifes. And I hope you all die.
Then there were the emails like this one:
You blue gums are not going to steal the election.
All of you porch monkeys need to go back to Africa.
McCain and Palin shortly began ratcheting back their rhetoric, especially after polls showed that such tactics were losing rather than gaining votes. But the fuse had been lit: threats and intimidating behavior continued to be reported around the country. In Ohio, a barn covered with pro-Obama signs was vandalized twice, the first time with racial epithets. In Sacramento, vandals scrawled “White Power,” “KKK” and “Nigger” over the front of a large homemade Obama display. In Idaho Falls, a large Obama sign had a Nazi swastika painted on it. In Tennessee, two neo-Nazi “skinheads” were arrested for plotting to assassinate Obama; according to federal agents, they planned to kill 102 black people in a murderous spree that would culminate in a suicidal attack on Obama.
As of the date of this writing, nothing indicated that the election’s outcome would put this fuse out. Indeed, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that it had recorded more than 200 hate-related incidents sparked by Obama’s election in the weeks immediately following.
These seemingly disparate incidents—the shooting in Kentucky and the increase of hateful speech in the campaign—received prominent coverage in the national news, but few noted the deep and significant connection between them. After all, what does yet another random “lone wolf” shooting spree in a public venue have to do with election-year rhetoric on the presidential campaign trail?
What connects them is that they are both manifestations of one of the most troubling aspects of modern American politics: the impulse to demonize our political adversaries, and the consequences of that demonization on our discourse and our body politic. This impulse has coursed through American politics since its beginnings, and it certainly exists on all sides of the nation’s political aisles today.
But more particularly, both episodes reflect a trend that has manifested itself with increasing intensity in the past decade: the positing of elimination as the solution to political disagreement. Rather than engaging in a dialogue over political and cultural issues, one side simply dehumanizes its opponents and suggests, and at times demands, their excision. This tendency is almost singularly peculiar to the American Right. It manifests itself in many venues: on radio talk shows and in political speeches, in bestselling books and babbling blogs. Most of all, we can feel it on the ground: in our everyday lives, in our encounters, big and small, with each other.