The Irrelevance of Intent: McCain and Palin Benefit from Racism

THIS WEEK, John McCain and Sarah Palin – both in public and in their campaign advertisements – continued their personal assault on Barack Obama as their standings in the polls (both nationally and in battleground states) continued to nose dive. This is typical, and on its face, not particularly problematic. Irrespective of party or ideology, when one’s candidate is losing on the issues, the last resort is to turn personal. Further, the politics of personal attacks have been part of presidential campaigns throughout our history. Most recently, Republicans attacked John Kerry as unpatriotic and untrustworthy, and Democrats attacked George W. Bush as being elitist and (paradoxically?) stupid. So some of this is not new. What is new is the extent to which these personal attacks on Obama tap into racist stereotypes of African Americans as untrustworthy (Obama has been called a "liar"), dangerous and as unAmerican.

Increasingly, McCain/Palin supporters have their backs up about this, so before they deluge the “comments” section with remarks that do not take into consideration the totality of our argument, let us be perfectly clear about what we are arguing (and what we are not).

We are NOT arguing that Palin and/or McCain are being intentionally bigoted in their comments. They very well may be, but whether they are or not is irrelevant to the point we are making here. Intent is absolutely irrelevant to consideration of what has been happening over the past week on the campaign trail. Intent is relevant to judging the character of candidates, but that is not what we seek to do in this space. We are interested to read about that in other spaces, but we do not claim to “know their hearts,” as President Bush might say.

We ARE arguing that the sort of assertions that are being made have the potential of unique and magnified effect as a result of the fact that they are being made against an African American candidate.

Perhaps what is most surprising is that we are not alone in this. While we have been writing about such effects for two years in this space, the mainstream media have, by and large, refused to engage in discussions of implicit racism. News organizations have certainly pointed out blatant, explicit bigotry (such as Don Imus’s comments, Michael Richards’s tirade, Mel Gibson’s drunken comments, etc.), but have largely shied away from shedding light on messages that maintain levels of plausible deniability from the sources. That is, if the racism inherent in the message is not a “slam dunk,” the mainstream media organizations have largely stayed clear of discussing it.

And for good reason. Since white folks want to talk about “intent” incessantly, any discussion of racism ultimately deteriorates into whether this person or that person is a “racist.” There is very little utility in this.

But what we have seen THIS WEEK is the media’s willingness to engage in decoding messages that are racist. While this is happening, McCain/Palin supporters are arguing that they are “not racist,” which, again is not at all the point. It is another example of Americans talking past one another on the complex issue of race relations.

Here are some examples.

While not new, we had yet to link to the Time Magazine story about the McCain ad (below) that some have argued suggests to fundamentalist Christians that Barack Obama may be the Antichrist.



But less alarmist concerns about Obama being “not like us” continue to pervade the McCain campaign discourse, just as we predicted at the start of the Republican National Convention.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd criticized what she sees as fear mongering by the McCain team (and McCain himself) in the wake of his “that one” comment at last week’s debate and what appears to be a resurgence of the same racist strategies that were used against McCain by Bush-supporting Republicans during his run for the presidency in 2000. (More on "that one" below)

In a Salon.com article, Gary Kamiya criticizes McCain’s campaign rhetoric THIS WEEK as reverting back to the historic Republican “Southern strategy” of invoking racial resentments to win the votes of white Southerners.

In The Washington Independent, Mary Kane reports about a flier that was circulated in her neighborhood that accuses white Obama supporters of liking him because of their own white guilt.

In contrast, a colleague of Stephen’s found this flier posted around her central Ohio neighborhood. (We are not sure if the errors are in the original or came during the transfer, but the substance is what is important.)

There were other reports that McCain volunteers were circulating information about Obama being an Arab or a Muslim, as well.

People protested outside of a Hendersonville, North Carolina real estate office, which featured this message on its marquee: “Osama-Obama; Not American; Not Welcome.”


This video (below) of McCain/Palin supporters in the parking lot of a campaign event made its way around the Internet THIS WEEK. Supporters are seen to be supportive of their ticket not because of the candidates’ merits or even the legitimate concerns about Obama (or Biden), but because of Obama’s status as “other.” The length they go to rationalize their irrational positions would be amusing if it were not so scary.



Politico also had a story THIS WEEK about voter anger at McCain/Palin rallies.

Individuals at McCain/Palin events were all over the news THIS WEEK, in fact. Much attention has been paid to the fact that John McCain twice had to disagree with supporters at events: one who said he was afraid of an Obama administration, and another who called Obama “an Arab.” John McCain responded in both cases by criticizing the supporter's comments, though he was booed by the audience after he did so in the first instance.

One guy brought an Obama monkey doll to a McCain campaign event. Watch the video below.



The mainstream media jumped all over this stuff (not fast enough for some, but it is irrefutable that they brought it to light).

Time Magazine’s Peter Beinart’s article complements TWIR guest blogger Ann Fisher’s offering last week by noting that attacks against Obama’s “patriotism” are not entirely distinct from appeals to “otherness.”

CNN’s Campbell Brown has put forth a number of statements and programs exploring the degree to which race has mattered in the election generally, and in the recent McCain/Palin events specifically. But, bless her heart, Brown does not entirely get it either.

Take this statement (below) as an example. Brown acknowledges the possibility of “race baiting” at McCain/Palin rallies, but criticizes those (like Dowd) who suggest that McCain’s referring to Obama as “that one” in the second presidential debate is overreacting. It is not. Invoking the common admonition by surface-deep ABC commentator John Stossel, Brown tells us to “give [her] a break” and asks us to “be careful” – to “use our heads.” Brown implicitly refers to the conscious mind as “our head” – as always, we argue that we must dig below that to really understand what is going on.

Brown says that calling Obama “that one” is not racist because she can remember her grandfather “talking about one of his kids or his grandkids as ‘that one.’” She allows for the fact that McCain may have meant to be disrespectful, but not racist. Here’s why she’s mistaken.

First, AGAIN, intent is not the issue. We do not believe that McCain was consciously being bigoted or even necessarily trying to implicitly tap into racist predispositions among potential supporters. He was, as he has been in all of the debates, being dismissive of Obama as not ready to be president. On its own, that is a legitimate campaign strategy. But with an African American opponent, referring to him in a way that puts him in the position of one’s child or grandchild is consistent with centuries of whites treating African Americans as children. If he had called Obama “boy” (as a McCain supporter called an African American cameraman this week), Brown would not have argued that the comment was not racist. If we are focusing on intent, there is a big difference between referring to Obama as “boy” or “that one”; since intent is not the most important element, the distinction is not important.

The McCain campaign has a strategy to convince white voters that Obama is not fit to be president on a number of levels. Since experience is not an option after they chose Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential candidate, they have focused almost exclusively on the “not like us” motif.

African American member of Congress John Lewis, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, reacted to all of these stories with a statement:

"As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse."

Speaking of the segregationist former Alabama governor and one-time presidential candidate George Wallace, Lewis said that Wallace "never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."

The McCain campaign responded with outrage, and the Obama campaign came to McCain’s defense, all of which was centered on the ridiculous notion that Lewis’s claim was about McCain’s intent. Lewis was, like we do each week, pointing out that it is not enough to be non-racist; one must be anti-racist in the face of such harmful messages. McCain himself clearly realized this at the end of the week as he began to criticize those messages at his rallies.

Watch McCain supporter U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (below), who claimed on Face the Nation Sunday morning that Lewis’s comments were “an absolute offense to people like [him].” He went on to say “[W]e’re not going to be intimidated by this playing the race card simply because Senator Obama’s record has been attacked in a very fair way.”



But John Lewis was not at all reacting to attacks on Obama’s record. He was responding to suggestions that Obama is a terrorist, which the campaign has almost solely focused on since they abandoned discussion about issues two weeks ago. When host Bob Sheiffer asked Graham if some of the comments at the McCain/Palin rallies were “over the line,” Graham responded that what was over the line was Obama’s attacks against McCain on things like stem cell research. Hey Lindsey – that’s AN ISSUE. There can be disagreement as to whether Obama misrepresented McCain on that issue, but to not understand how criticizing an issue is not the same as implying that one’s opponent is sympathetic to terrorists is an alarming display of either stupidity or disingenuousness.

In contrast to all of this is an op-ed by Michael Cohen of The New American Foundation, who basically argues that if race matters at all, it will be in a way that benefits Obama. He says concerns about the way race implicitly biases white voters against Obama are “wildly overstated.”

Ok, Mike. Whatever you say. The examples we list above are surely just anomalies. Very few people really think like this.

How does that sand taste?

We leave you THIS WEEK with a grim prediction that we hope is not realized: the McCain/Palin events will become more heated and racial over the coming days. Someone will be caught using the n-word; someone will be caught with an Obama doll in a noose. Those actions cannot fairly be argued to be reflective of the candidates or the campaigns, but it is important to ask, as John Lewis has, why those folks feel comfortable saying and doing such things at McCain/Palin events. Remember, when McCain chastised the man for saying he was afraid of Obama, McCain was booed. In contrast, when Obama gave McCain credit for doing so, the crowd cheered. This is not to say that no Obama supporters are overly angry or out of control, but neither is it fair to merely say that “both sides have their wackos.”

The hatred is very lopsided here, and it is the responsibility of John McCain (and to a lesser extent Sarah Palin) to vociferously condemn such ideas, not just the actions. If they do, they risk putting a damper on the excitement they have stirred up among their most conservative and less educated supporters (we do not mean to imply any degree of overlap between those categories, by the way); if they do not, they will continue to alienate moderates that they will need to win the presidency.