Let me be clear; I'm voting Obama because of Obama. It never mattered to me who the Republican candidate was going to be, really, and my admiration for Obama's career and campaign has been enthusiastic and pretty dang consistent (well, I'm not wild about the forgoing of public financing, but other than that...). So for the most part, any scrutiny by me on the McCain camp would be a needless change in focus, and not just a little bit redundant.
That said:
A McCain campaign worker, a Muslim man named Daniel Zubairi, did something admirable at a Virginia McCain rally that turned ugly. He stood up to an attendee's xenophobic anti-Islam ranting, and told the man that the McCain campaign does not endorse his message. Nice work, Zubairi: stay calm, stand firm and tell the haters to cool it.
Points for the McCain folks, right? A welcome antidote to the fear-mongering associated with some nutjob supporters we've all been hearing about, right? Not so. CNN's Rick Sanchez has been trying to get Zubairi on his show for an interview, to talk us all through what happened at that rally. Zubairi wants to come. In fact, they've scheduled an interview several times, but each time, before Zubairi is set to go on the air, somebody higher up than him in the campaign has pulled him. Until today, we could only speculate as to why, but Zubairi's email to Sanchez today clears it up pretty well, explaining that he has been muzzled by the campaign because his story does not fit with "the tone" the campaign wants to be setting right now.
Um, WTF?
Meanwhile...
You've all heard about this one: a 20-year-old phonebanking staffer for the McCain campaign, named Ashley Todd, called the Pittsburgh police to report that she had been mugged at an ATM, and that the mugger, a tall dark-skinned black man (dressed in black!), upon seeing the McCain bumper sticker on her car, attacked her again and told her she had to support Obama, going so far as to "carve the letter B on her face" (B for Barack, so we presumed).
You know this too: she made it all up. Local police noticed some pretty bizarre irregularities in her story, and continued to question her until it became very clear and she ultimately confessed to fabricating the entire story. She wasn't even at the ATM in question, and the B scratched on her face is backwards, as though created while Todd was looking in the mirror. Oops. It's pretty clear what her intent was-- to try to turn the media narrative, and ultimately Pennsylvania voters, towards a sense that the Obama campaign is the dangerous, violent one.
But that's not what's significant. What matters to me is that the McCain campaign itself, pretty much as soon as the young woman's (not-yet-debunked) story broke, was pushing it as a news item. According to Talking Points Memo, the campaign got involved pretty directly:
John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."
So let me get this straight. When it comes to isolated incidents involving low-level McCain staffers, the campaign says that the story of a young Muslim supporter doing his job well (and doing his civic duty as a responsible citizen pretty damn well too) is not in keeping with the tone they want to set. Because....? Because their priority right now is to seize upon the support of people like the older white dude in the video, rather than the younger ethnic-looking dude (and anyone who might be proud of him)? But their tone remains unruffled by pushing a fishy story about a young white female supporter getting attacked by a black Obama supporter-- including helpfully supplying some direct quotes from the alleged attacker? They're cool with pouncing on a story that will thrust a (supposed) victim of a violent crime into the spotlight? What's more, they are so frantic for good (?) press as to associate themselves with a story that looked suspicious from the start, before the police could even confirm the woman's story?
What is wrong with these people? I'm not going to hold the campaign accountable for the anti-Islamic guy or the wacko self-mutilating race-baiting girl. I'm really not. (Well, maybe someday I will. It's hard to say right now with any objectivity whether or not the tone of the campaign is encouraging the crazies or if the crazies are just gravitating toward the campaign out of desperation). What I am saying is that the McCain folks are idiots this week, and that their decisions regarding the racial/religious/nationalistic undertones of many of their supporters have been baffling and hugely disappointing. At the very least, they are complicit in the "culture war" nonsense that has been poisoning political discourse for far, far too long.
In any case, it seems pretty clear to me: Ashley Todd needs to be prosecuted. And Daniel Zubairi needs to jump this particular ship. C'mon, Daniel-- the water's fine. We'll take ya.
