Amazing. So the same kind of scene happened again on Friday as on Thursday. The crowd demanded that McCain show some fight, and he replied in effect NO, THAT WOULD BE DIVISIVE. (See the article below.)
It’s the ultimate McCain moment, summing up his career, in which McCain departs from Republicans because they want to fight the left on some issue and he tells them, “No, we can’t do that, because IT WOULD BE DIVISIVE.”
So the Republicans in their desperation at the prospect of Obama are left with no choice but to vote for this candidate they nominated who himself refuses to fight Obama.
A perfect working out of character and fate—for the Republicans, for McCain.
Now, in McCain’s defense, it wasn’t a simple situation. Some people addressing him in that Republican group said abusive things, stupid things about Obama, ‘He’s an Arab, a terrorists, a traitor,” and McCain had to be responsible and say that that was wrong.
At the same time, you don’t do what McCain did here, which was just shut up your own people and tell them Obama is a good man and leave your supporters with nothing.
Instead, after telling them what is the wrong way to talk about Obama, McCain should have told them the right way to talk about Obama, like this:
We shouldn’t be calling Obama an Arab, a terrorist, a traitor, that kind of talk is out of line here. He’s not a terrorist, he’s not a traitor. But here’s what we know about Obama for a fact. Obama spent 20 years devotedly following an America-hating, white-hating pastor who taught his congregation that the black race is superior and the white race is evil, and Obama never criticized him. To the contrary, he repeatedly described him as his spiritual guide and as the most influential person in his life. Then, when that pastor’s statements began to come to light, Obama, who by his own admission had attended that church at least twice a month for 20 years, denied having ever heard that pastor say hateful things from the pulpit, until the whole country saw what that pastor was like, and Obama was forced to dissociate himself from him, while still denying that he had heard him say the kinds of things he obviously said all the time.
While he was attending that hate-America church, Obama worked for the well-known unrepentant Weather Underground bomber William Ayers, a self-described communist, as the first chairman of a foundation that Ayers had set up to propagandize school kids and turn them into leftist activists. Then, while Obama was serving as the chairman of Ayers’s foundation, Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, also a Weather Underground bomber, hosted in their Chicago home the fundraiser for Obama that launched his political career. I repeat: Obama began his political career in the home of an unrepentant Weatherman bomber whose stated objective was to overthrow the United States. Obama was a close associate, partner, and beneficiary of this person for at least seven years in the 1990s, and when this relationship came to light Obama outrageously lied about it and said that Ayers was just someone he bumped into occasionally in his neighborhood.
Those aren’t smears, my friends, those are facts.
Now, I repeat that Obama is not an America-hater and a terrorist, it’s wrong to say that, I won’t have that kind of talk in this campaign. But we do know for a fact that Obama, instead of avoiding American-haters and terrorists, closely associates with them. We know for a fact that he tolerates them and sees nothing wrong with them. And we know for a fact that when called out on his associations with such people, he dishonestly denies knowing anything about them.
What does that tell us about what kind of president he will be? It tells us that he will form close relations with terrorist and pro-terrorist leaders abroad, as already shown by his pledge to meet the president of Iran without conditions. It suggests that he will get cozy with anti-American leftists, both those abroad, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and in America. And he will lie about doing so.
There’s no guesswork here, my friends. Obama’s consistent record is a clear indication of what he will do as president.
And I say to the American people, you are free to elect my opponent if you choose to do so. But you are not free to change facts. And you can be sure that a man who has tolerated and made friends with enemies of America all his life, instead of opposing them, will continue to do so as president of the United States.
If McCain were to speak like this, he would be making a logical, factual case, not just trafficking in adjectives and smear words. The left wouldn’t be able to dismiss him. That would be leadership. But of course this is all light-years beyond him.
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McCain booed after trying to calm anti-Obama crowd
By PHILIP ELLIOTT and BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writers
LAKEVILLE, Minn.—The anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is acting to tamp it down. McCain was booed by his own supporters Friday when, in an abrupt switch from raising questions about Barack Obama’s character, he described the Democrat as a “decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.” ADVERTISEMENT
A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and even “off with his head” have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.
McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. A voter said, “The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight.” Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama.
“If you want a fight, we will fight,” McCain said. “But we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments.” When people booed, he cut them off. [LA replies: “If they want the goddamn fence, we’ll give it to them.]
“I don’t mean that has to reduce your ferocity,” he said. “I just mean to say you have to be respectful.”
Presidential candidates are accustomed to raucous rallies this close to Election Day and welcome the enthusiasm. But they are also traditionally monitors of sorts from the stage. Part of their job is to leaven proceedings if tempers run ragged and to rein in an out-of-bounds comment from the crowd.
Not so much this week, at GOP rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and other states.
When a visibly angry McCain supporter in Waukesha, Wis., on Thursday told the candidate “I’m really mad” because of “socialists taking over the country,” McCain stoked the sentiment. “I think I got the message,” he said. “The gentleman is right.” He went on to talk about Democrats in control of Congress.
On Friday, McCain rejected the bait.
“I don’t trust Obama,” a woman said. “I have read about him. He’s an Arab.”
McCain shook his head in disagreement, and said:
“No, ma’am. He’s a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with (him) on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about.”
He had drawn boos with his comment: “I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”
The anti-Obama taunts and jeers are noticeably louder when McCain appears with Palin, a big draw for GOP social conservatives. She accused Obama this week of “palling around with terrorists” because of his past, loose association with a 1960s radical. If less directly, McCain, too, has sought to exploit Obama’s Chicago neighborhood ties to William Ayers, while trying simultaneously to steer voters’ attention to his plans for the financial crisis.
The Alaska governor did not campaign with McCain on Friday, and his rally in La Crosse, Wis., earlier Friday was much more subdued than those when the two campaigned together. Still, one woman shouted “traitor” when McCain told voters Obama would raise their taxes.
Volunteers worked up chants from the crowd of “U.S.A.” and “John McCain, John McCain,” in an apparent attempt to drown out boos and other displays of negative energy.
The Secret Service confirmed Friday that it had investigated an episode reported in The Washington Post in which someone in Palin’s crowd in Clearwater, Fla., shouted “kill him,” on Monday, meaning Obama. There was “no indication that there was anything directed at Obama,” Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren told AP. “We looked into it because we always operate in an atmosphere of an abundance of caution.”
Palin, at a fundraiser in Ohio on Friday, told supporters “it’s not negative and it’s not mean-spirited” to scrutinize Obama’s iffy associations.
But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania an author of 15 books on politics, says the vitriol has been encouraged by inflammatory words from the stage.
“Red-meat rhetoric elicits emotional responses in those already disposed by ads using words such as ‘dangerous’ ‘dishonorable’ and ‘risky’ to believe that the country would be endangered by election of the opposing candidate,” she said.
Beth Fouhy reported from New York. Associated Press writer Joe Milicia contributed to this story from Cleveland.
James W. writes: