Hitting Obama with the race card?

Last Modified: 13 Oct 2008
By: Felicity Spector

Felicity Spector blogs on the accusations likening Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden.

The campaign isn't just dirty, now it's getting downright nasty.

John McCain was once the kind of man who disassociated himself from stuff like this - but now, his campaign, his supporters, and his vice presidential nominee, are pumping out material that questions Barack Obama's credentials as an American.

"Barack Hussein Obama", cried one state official introducing Sarah Palin at a rally - at which she declared the Democratic senator was "not one of us".

'Both have friends who bombed the Pentagon'
Jeffrey M Frederick on Obama and Bin Laden

Now, on the back of all those GOP ads pushing Obama's alleged links to former Weatherman William Ayers, the chairman of Virginia's Republican party has directly compared Obama to the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden.

According to Time Magazine, Jeffrey M Frederick told state volunteers that Obama and bin Laden "both have friends who bombed the Pentagon". And, although a McCain spokesman did describe the comparison as "inappropriate", Frederick is standing by his remarks.

Before you dismiss this as the wayward comments of a state party official, just take a look at a press release, published last week on the official McCain Palin website.

It brands the Illinois senator as someone who likes to hang around with murderers, guilt by association: quoting a man whose father died in a Weatherman underground attack when Obama was eight years old: "Barack Obama's friend tried to kill my family."

Not much subtlety there, then.

And then there's the increasingly vitriolic speeches of Governor Palin herself. Phrases like this: Obama "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist." Well, hardly.

And the New York Times has revealed how Palin's convention speech contained this quote: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," from an unattributed writer.

Sounds innocuous enough, except the writer turns out to be the notorious right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler, well-known in the middle of the last century for his racist and anti-Semitic views.

In his column last week Robert F Kennedy junior revealed just what Pegler wished for his father - as he considered running for the White House in 1965.

"Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls." Nothing much subtle about that, either.

Is this really the sort of person a nominee for the vice presidency of the United States should be quoting from - unattributed or otherwise?

Talk about a judgement issue.

At best, it's incredibly ignorant, not to mention offensive. At worst, combined with the other things that have been emanating from the McCain campaign, it's downright sinister.

America, surely, deserves better than this.