McCain's threat to "Whip Obama's you-know-what," as I and others have diaried about a few days ago (see below), has been largely dismissed an inconsequential on a number of threads on dkos.
I'm glad that so many have commented, though I'm surprised by the willingness of so many to dismiss McCain's comment so easily.
In particular, it's useful to analyze the comment in the context of recent Republican attempts to portray Obama as alien and the decades-long Republican Southern Strategy to mobilize the white racist vote.
Previous Diaries on the Subject
Several diarists addressed this before my first diary. I apologize to those who diaried this before me. I did a search on dkos before diarying it, but apparently if you don't search for "stories and diaries" other diaries don't show up. I didn't know that until now. Certainly, if I had known, I would have at least linked to diaries here, here ("Whipping Obama?! What's next lynching?)", here, here, and here (though this diarist unforunately replies by saying Obama is going to do it to McCain, and adds some anti-fat bigotry into the mix).
Just an Expression?
Most commenters on my previous diary and the other diaries linked to above have objected that it's "just an expression." Of course it's a common expression. I wrote in my previous diary that it was a violent metaphor. The fact that it is a metaphor doesn't exempt the expression from political-linguistic analysis.
What are the denotations and connotations of the metaphor? I'm surprised how quickly many of the commenters are willing to look past the denotative meaning of "whip." A number of commenters have mentioned that they use the phrase themselves. I would hope that we, particularly those of us who are white, would reconsider this usage. Can we really afford to forget or ignore what a whip actually does to human flesh -- and the pain it causes? A whip is an implement of torture.
A number of commenters have urged us to look at the context of the statement, not just the denotative meaning. I agree that's important too.
Some have aaid, essentially, "it's a common 'macho' metaphor." A few commenters dismissed the comment as just "frat boy" talk. This hardly excuses it. It just means that McCain's comment is also an example of his patriarchal privilege as well.
Others have said that without further evidence, they wanted to give McCain the benefit of the doubt. But McCain does have a history of overt bigotry, referring to Vietnamese people as "gooks" as late as his 2000 presidential campain.
McCain's Racist Southern Strategy
But there's another aspect of the context I didn't notice when I wrote my first diary but a few other of the diarists linked to above pointed out. McCain said this in Virginia. A white politician threatening to whip a black politician's you know what -- in Virginia -- and many people are arguing it's not racist?
Republican presidential politics have depended since 1968 on a racist southern strategy for victory. It's worth examining this in some detail, hearing from Republican strategists themselves, via Rightwingwatch.
the so-called "Southern Strategy" employed by Richard Nixon to win over traditional Southern Democrats who were angry by the party’s emerging pro-civil rights positions. As Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips explained it:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Ronald Regan’s strategist Lee Atwater was even more blunt about the reasoning behind the strategy:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ " said Atwater. "By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites."
The Chair of the RNC, Ken Mehlman, who was Bush II's campaign manager, also admitted it and apologized for the Republican's racism, in 2005, according to the Wikipedia entry on the topic,
Following the 2004 re-election of President George W. Bush, in which few African Americans voted for Bush and other Republicans, Ken Mehlman, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee and Bush's campaign manager, delivered several speeches at meetings with African-American business, community, and religious leaders in which he apologized for his party's use of the Southern Strategy in the past. Said Mehlman, when asked about the southern strategy that used race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once Democratic South, Mehlman replied, "Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions," and, "[B]y the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."[18]
Fast forward to today. As many folks have commented here, one of the major themes of the past 10 days of campaigning by Palin in particular is that, as the LA Times reported,
"This is not a man who sees America as you and I see America," Palin said of Obama. "We see America as a force for good in this world. We see America as a force for exceptionalism. . . . Our opponents see America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who would bomb their own country."
(they have the video there, as well).
The racist codings are vintage Republican Southern Strategy, and the overt racism coming out of the McCain-Palin crowds are cheering these messages on (see for example, the diary, "Frank Rich on McCain's Howling Mob").
So, less than a week after a member of a McCain-Palin crowd threatened Obama's life, McCain says what in response? Does he call for an end to violent threats and an end to racism? No, he threatens to whip Obama -- in Virginia.
Whether McCain's boastful threat was conscious or unconscious, calculated or oblivious, it's still racist.