Saying One Thing, Doing The Other
by Steve Soto
In the midst of a lame complaint from McCain that Democratic representative John Lewis was out of line in criticizing his campaign for its rhetoric, Time Magazine's Karen Tumulty shows us that the newly-elected head of the Virginia GOP is instructing his field workers in that state with bogus talking points to help them spread the message of smear and fear door-to-door.
If John McCain is as serious as he says about running a "respectful" campaign against an opponent he considers "a decent person," word hasn't yet trickled down to his newly opened storefront field office in Gainesville, Virginia.
"We haven't seen a race like this in Virginia — ever," said state GOP Chairman Jeffrey M. Frederick. "The last time was 40 years ago, and they didn't run races like this."
No, they didn't, thanks to thugs and slugs like Frederick, Sarah Palin, and John McCain.
The McCain campaign invited me to visit Frederick and the Gainesville operation on Saturday morning, to get a first-hand glimpse of its ground game in Prince William County, Virginia, a fast-growing area about 30 miles from Washington, D.C.
With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon," he said. "That is scary." It is also not exactly true — though that distorted reference to Obama's controversial association with William Ayers, a former 60s radical, was enough to get the volunteers stoked. "And he won't salute the flag," one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, "We don't even know where Senator Obama was really born." Actually, we do; it's Hawaii.
Everything we will see the rest of the way from the GOP is a classic Tier One/Tier Two campaign aimed at undermining the legitimacy of an Obama victory, from the ACORN smears and hypocritical complaints from the GOP about Democratic voter fraud, to the claims that Obama is tied to terrorists and therefore should at least be ignored as a traitor and at worst hunted down.
Obama and his surrogates need to shine a light on this so that a counter-narrative is established to marginalize these efforts as those of an extremist base of a irrelevant political party doing anything it can to hold power, even at the cost of our civil society and democracy.