the campaign atmosphere

increasingly over the past few weeks i’ve had to respond to an unsettling number of alarming accusations about Barack Obama that are concerning people i meet here in southern illinois.  They range from him being secretly Muslim, refusing to salute the flag, refusing to put his hand on a Bible on election day (granted I haven’t heard that he will, but I am assuming, and either way i believe he has the right not to), that millions of African Americans will march on DC and demand free everything now that ‘one of their own’ is in the whitehouse, that his family from Kenya will move in and live that fat life, and today, that his campaign has so much money because it is financed by evil dictators who will then have control over him once he is elected.  Paticularly disconcerting is Gov. Palin’s comparisons between him and terrorists.  I’m sure most people have seen clips of a woman at a rally saying Obama couldn’t be trusted (or something to that effect) because he was an Arab.

This is a type of fear mongering and hateful politics i’ve never witnessed before.  I can’t speak to times before the 1980′s, but even when the political climate was frosty and personal (Florida/Jeb Bush/Supreme Court stuff in 2000 or the Clinton impeachment), I never remember the types of accusations that tried to convince voters that a politican was evil or would actively lessen the security of the US.  To me this is unprecedented and seems like the kind of language that might have been used in other places and times right before starting some serious persecution.  Its also distracting to the issues.  McCain (very honorably) is now spending his time defending Obama’s character and cleaning up Palin’s rabble-rousing messes instead of focusing on the issues that are actually important in the election.  This has gotten so out of control that his attempts to maintain civility have propted booing at his own rallies!  I think that Fox news and especially O’reilly (a source of a lot of this stuff) is really doing conservatives a disservice by making Mccain deal with this problem on top of obama’s already widening poll margins. I also find it interesting that although i’ve heard a lot of griping by mccain supporters about how obama isn’t attacked in the media because of his race etc, it seems to me that attacks of this nature wouldn’t be considered against politicans without such attributes.

I feel like McCain was one of only a few true Statesmen left.  He’s served this country well in all possible ways during his life, has always put others before self, traveled the world as a respected politician by everyone who he met and managed to stay above partisan beefs.  Unfortunately barring some serious developments (finding Osama?) it looks like he’s lost the election at this point and I hope that the mess that other’s have created for him doesn’t tarnish his legacy as a great American.

Either way, we need our politics to focus on the issues and not attempt to strike fear into the populace.