McSmear and His Racist Campaign

We've seen this all before, but that doesn't mean it's okay to see it again.

McCain and his campaign know that the only chance they have to win this year is by making voters cynical about Obama, while at the same time making enough people afraid of Obama because he's black.

John McCain's campaign is racist. It's all led by the ad campaign, which McCain himself reinforces on the stump.

To begin with, you must understand that McCain and his campaign advisors don't make the ads. McCain "approves" them, and those running his campaign
decide what they want the ads to say and do. But the ads are made by advertising professionals--the same people who make, for instance, those Cialis ads. They know exactly what they're doing.

I mention those ads because there are overt messages and subconscious messages in TV ads, and the Viagra and Cialis ads for products that increase male sexual potency have identifiable images supporting their message. You don't have to register the images consciously or even notice them for them to work--or that's the theory. The point is, those images aren't there by accident. Professional admakers put them there.

Sometimes they are made more obvious for fun, but most of the time, you aren't supposed to consciously notice them. For example, that Cialis ad that begins with the couple who would rather be having sex but must deal instead with a broken kitchen faucet. But this faucet doesn't leak. It gushes water high in the air. The phallic symbolism is almost too literal, but the ad quickly moves on to other homey scenes, all of which contain prominent if more traditional phallic and sexual symbols.

The McShame "celebrity" ad shows Obama, and then fleeting images of two famous blond white women, then Obama. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert points out that the ad also contains traditional phallic imagery as well. The message, as Eugene Robinson said on Countdown Monday, is one of the oldest in American history to instill fear of a black man: the slave is going to rape the white daughter of the plantation.

It may seem far-fetched, but these are advertising professionals, they are used to using this kind of imagery, and nothing--not a single frame of such a short commercial is there by accident.

It is not the only attempt to tap into the underground current of subconscious racism--much of McCain's campaign is following that line of attack. Bob Herbert in his column titled "Running While Black" writes: "Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates."

Herbert links this ad to the others, and to McCain smears on Obama's patriotism, and the attempts to paint him as essentially too dumb (and maybe shiftless and lazy) to be President: "The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control... It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches — a man who obviously does not know his place."

These code words and images are a toxic tradition, and even though African Americans like Herbert are likely to be the first to identify them, they're by now so obvious that white people can recognize them. As did the centrist, sometimes-Republican, sometimes Democrat David Gergen, who said this on TV Sunday:

"There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, 'he's not one of us,'" said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. "I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it's the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for, 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, 'I'm against quotas,' we get what that's about."

John McCain, who rose to prominence as a different kind of Republican, has sold his soul to the forces of darkness, the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove school of haters and liars. He's John McSmear now. And on the basis of his campaign, I call him a racist.

Update: Additional perspective from KNBC in Los Angeles.