Speaking in Miami, Florida today, John McCain insisted that the crowd "pay attention" to his opponent's "words". Sounds like pretty good advice to me. Makes more sense than paying attention to the ways John McCain and others on the right are distorting those words and their self-evident meanings.
As a case in point, I direct you to what Sen. McCain said about Barack Obama's words, about a minute later. It's been the big moment in McCain's speeches over the last 24 hours. He made the same observation in Dayton, Ohio, and in other appearances. It's a fair bet that he will continue to make the point over the next week.
The money quote, according to Sen. McCain:
"He said, and I quote, "One of the tragedies of the civil rights movement is that it didn't bring about redistributive change".
So, that's what this campaign has come down to, in its closing days. McCain makes an attack out of a comment by Obama about the failure of the civil rights movement to adequately redress the devastating impact of four centuries of slavery and another hundred years of racism, segregation, oppression and spirit-crushing discrimination. Obama noted that while the civil rights movement was successful in the courts in wiping away previously practiced legally-supported racial discrimination, it didn't do enough to ameliorate the impact of a system of white privilege which had become part of the nation's economic and social infrastructure over that time.
Obama's criticism is thus: The civil rights movement gave blacks equal legal rights, but it didn't do enough to put them on an equal footing with white Americans. It didn't address economic and political inequality.
In Dayton, McCain "quoted" Obama at greater length ((I apologize for not being able to figure out how to embed the video -- if anybody can lay the proper code/link on me, I'd be most grateful)):
He said, and I quote, "one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused that I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change."
And John McCain thinks Americans should be scared by such talk from Obama. For me, he's crossed the Rubicon. Over the last year, I've challenged folks on this site when they've leveled what I thought were unfair claims of racism, first against Clinton supporters, and later against those in the McCain camp. It's hard to defend McCain on this point. It's either deliberate racism or incredible ignorance.
Barack Obama was finding some fault in the single-minded focus on a legal strategy, attacking discrimination through litigation, rather than a more comprehensive strategy that might have politically empowered the disenfranchised and disadvantaged African-American minority. Obama's point was that though the legal barriers which enforced inequality did fall, this did not produce any fundamental transformation of a system which gave whites great economic and political advantages compared to their black countrymen. Obama's talking about real empowerment, rather than the ephemeral promise of the years of affirmative action dictated by white elites, a promise which the Supreme Court has largely extinguished in recent years.
In attacking Obama for this remark, McCain is saying he finds nothing wrong with the racism that is embedded within a system that maintains white privilege, even as certain extraordinary individuals like Barack Obama himself successfully chafe against and rise above the limitations imposed by that rigid system of economic privilege that rests upon centuries of racial injustice. McCain's latest attack line is, in itself, barely disguised racism, and it's coming in waves from the right-wing.
Last night, Keith Olbermann brought up an attack by Rush Limbaugh, claiming that Barack Obama is unfit to be President because he sees the Constitution as fundamentally flawed. In fact, Obama was making the point that the Constitution, as written was a flawed document, because it enshrined slavery and the disenfranchisement of African slaves. By deliberately ignoring the particulars of Obama's criticism -- by leaving out the details that are the real substance of the remark -- Limbaugh is, in essence, defending the Constitution as it was written in 1787, with blacks counting as 3/5 of a person.
People on the right, like Limbaugh, may claim that such remarks are not racist. Isolated from their context, there is no overt racism there. But, when you look at the substance of Obama's remarks, the substance they are criticizing, it's hard to say with a straight face that these men aren't endorsing historical white racial privilege. You can't criticize a man for pointing out the undeniable truth that the system has been rigged against blacks for centuries -- you can't attack someone for making that point, without implicitly defending structural racial inequalities.
McCain ups the ante by making the economic argument in reverse:
"Redistributive change. That's what change means for the Obama Administration - the redistributor. It means taking your money and giving it to someone else."
In this case, since Obama was talking about racial economic justice, it means taking money from white people and giving it to black people. John McCain is against that, and he's telling you that you should be afraid that's what Obama is going to do. He's arguing against a "redistribution" that will address racial injustice and inequality, because that would be taking YOUR money and giving it to "someone else". At least, it's your money if your white...and you should be against any redistribution of wealth that might help blacks.
So, I say to John McCain -- you may not think that's what you're really saying, but that would mean you're not thinking at all. Or, it means you don't care what Obama was really saying, and you're willing to twist it any which way. In the last 24 hours, you have set yourself up as the champion of white privilege. That's what this campaign has come down to, in its final week. So many well-meaning people were afraid the campaign would sink to such racially-coded arguments. We were hoping against hope that it wouldn't. Our hopes have been crushed.
McCain has plumbed the deepest, darkest depths, reaching for base, racist demagoguery. He reached down there, pulled out this turd, and served it up for our consumption.
John McCain -- J'accuse!