John McCain has made an unforgivable Machiavellian decision to run the most dishonest and un-American presidential campaign in my lifetime, which began with FDR, my first president.
In his apparent desire to win at any cost, John McCain now employes the very tactics he vehemently denounced when Bush used them against him in 2000. It is as though McCain has sold his soul to the Devil, and in the process has willingly flushed his once-noble character down the toilet. McCain clearly understands that the kinds of distortion, innuendo, blatant lies, and race-baiting tactics that Bush targeted him with in 2000 were what defeated him in S. Carolina, and from which he never rebounded during the remainder of the 2000 campaign. Precisely because these tactics proved so successful, as soon as he began to fear an Obama victory, McCain fully embraced them. How ironic and shameful.
As prominent Republican leaders have questioned McCain's strategies, he has publicly denied them and "condemned" such operations — and then continued them. His cynical use of push polling, racially-charged robo calls, voter-suppression schemes, constant lies about Obama's record, suggestions that Obama is sympathetic to terrorists, questioning Obama's integrity, and impugning Obama's patriotism, have each revealed not just a lack of integrity but also an appallingly dangerous temperament. Worst of all, McCain's tactics have produced a frightening atmosphere of racial hate in the last three months of his despicable campaign — another consequence of which occurred in Denver during the night of October 18th.
A good Republican friend of mine voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004. Now, however, she displays an Obama '08 bumper sticker on her car. On the morning of October 19th, she came out of her condo in a pleasant Denver neighborhood and found that her car had been vandalized. Three of her tires were flat. They had been slashed. The criminal had taped this frightening note to her driver's-side window:
FUCK Obama
bitch
Nobama
Is this vomitous act a direct result of McCain-Palin tactics? Perhaps not "direct." But it is certainly a disturbing symptom of the atmosphere of hate that their ads and their rallies are producing. My friend is sending the $300 bill for her new tires to the McCain campaign.
I can't help but wonder what McCain's young daughter of color will think when she is old enough to look back at her father's racist behavior in 2008. Can the old John McCain ever return — a Navy veteran and United States Senator of integrity and honor? Sadly, even if he does, John McCain has thrown away all that he once stood for in this country.