While some Republicans are eager to exploit the political weaknesses Hillary Clinton has exposed in Barack Obama during her march through the backcountry, John McCain won’t be able to make use of Obama’s cultural disconnection as ably as the former first lady.
The most obvious problem is that if any Republican had bragged about having “white voters” on his side and had surrogates dismissing “eggheads and African-Americans,” the question wouldn’t be whether his campaign was racist, as it has been in Clinton’s case, but whether to try him for hate crimes.
Be assured that the stalwarts of the old media who were made squeamish by Clinton’s unceasing poking at racial and cultural anxieties would run around with their hair on fire if McCain did the same.
Whatever she has become in the eyes of most reporters, Clinton is still at least a Democrat.
For a Republican candidate other than McCain, the media outrage might be less damaging. George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan could have even turned the denouncements into positives as Clinton has tried to do. Nothing burnishes outsider credentials like being hammered by the “elites.”
But McCain has long courted the approval of mainstream intellectuals. On carbon emissions, campaign-finance reform and a host of other issues, McCain has established himself as the Republican least odious to the mainstream left.
And if the senator’s outrage over The New York Times’ decision to rehash the details of his acquaintance with a blond lobbyist in the tawdriest terms possible is any indication, the inevitable breakup between McCain and the media is going to be messy.
While surrogates and third-party groups can do a lot of the heavy lifting on branding Obama as alien and out of touch, the blowback will still come right at McCain.
Soon, the Democratic nominating process will breathe its last ragged breath, and most of the reporters, editors and talking heads who are still bending over backward to pretend that Clinton is a viable candidate will unite behind Obama.
The good press Obama got against Clinton early on will look like Edward R. Murrow interviewing Joe McCarthy compared with the heavy petting the junior senator from Illinois will get during the general.
If every McCain news conference revolves around what some ham-handed party operative from Bucksnort County said about Obama’s middle name and McCain’s subsequent expressions of deep regret, he’ll back himself right out of the Oval Office.
Just how bad will it be?
We got a sense Tuesday in the latest GOP congressional loss. A Mississippi Republican running against an Obama-backed Democrat was beaten in a district held by Republicans since 1994.
That wouldn’t have been such a big deal under normal circumstances. There were no party affiliations on the ballot, and it was a special election unattached from the regular political calendar.
But in this race, the Republican and his backers in the national party had hit the Democrat hard for his association with Obama.
The ads were effective. The Democrat flailed, even denying Obama’s endorsement. New ads hit the airwaves tweaking the Democrat for trying to evade Obama’s blessing. Poll numbers started to move.
But the national press corps was moving, too. A New York Times reporter came to town and decided that the ads were implicitly racist, lamenting the revisiting of Mississippi’s “tortured legacy of race-based politics.”
Not mentioned by The Times were the mailers dropped by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the days before the election in which the Republican was linked to the Ku Klux Klan.
The basis for the claim is that the Republican, as mayor of a suburban Memphis town, had volunteered to take the statues of Confederate leaders that Memphis was tearing down.
Saving a statue of Jefferson Davis in the state he represented in the Senate is a little different than putting up a statue to the first Grand Kleagle of the Klan, but the cheap shot merited none of the outrage that erupted when he linked his opponent to Obama.
In Mississippi, a Republican candidate with problems keeping his base together in a difficult year was hit by allegations of racism late in the campaign, turning swing voters toward his Democratic opponent and losing the election.
McCain will meet the same fate if he allows his candidacy to be an apologia for American racism.
