Does McCain want to be remembered as the last racist?
Trading comments with Anonymous got me thinking about McCain, "the race card," and history.
No matter how this election comes out, the first serious non-white candidate for President is going to be a major event in every history class and textbook for the next century.
Even if he somehow won the presidency, if the narrative ever becomes "McCain playing racial politics," even by association, it'll become his historical legacy.
I think his campaign staff, not faced with their names being memorized by generations of high school students, are more willing to dance closer to that racial line, and I'll be curious how far they'll end up dragging him.
Would you want to be that guy in the history books? Those are the consequences of the game he's playing.
(Of course, even David Gergen says the McCain campaign is playing the "uppity" card.)
No matter how this election comes out, the first serious non-white candidate for President is going to be a major event in every history class and textbook for the next century.
Even if he somehow won the presidency, if the narrative ever becomes "McCain playing racial politics," even by association, it'll become his historical legacy.
I think his campaign staff, not faced with their names being memorized by generations of high school students, are more willing to dance closer to that racial line, and I'll be curious how far they'll end up dragging him.
Would you want to be that guy in the history books? Those are the consequences of the game he's playing.
(Of course, even David Gergen says the McCain campaign is playing the "uppity" card.)
posted by mikevotes at
3:45 PM
3 Comments:
Is Gergen "The Human Pendulum" still on the left, or has he flipped back to the right again?
By
Anonymous, at 5:33 PM
Just realize that the most controversial moments of the campaign are yet to come. The swift-boats, the "Gerald Ford mangling language in Eastern Europe", the "clueless elitist who was never in a supermarket checkout line". That kind of thing.
By
Anonymous, at 5:52 PM
Anon, definitely. If it were a boxing match, we'd be in the first few exchanges. Very unlikely to be decisive, and nobody's swinging their hardest yet..
By
mikevotes, at 8:59 PM
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