The Politics of Race

The Meltdown of the McCain/Palin campaign over the last few days is making me start to feel bad for John McCain. After all, he has sacrificed his reputation for this campaign though, thank goodness, America will forget in due time. Two things were going to happen when John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate; she was going to energize the Republican conservative base and perhaps skim off former Hillary supporters who, in their disappointment appeared to reject Barack Obama out of hand or she would personify exactly what she was thought to be at the time, a neophyte lacking the credentials to be Vice President.

It seems that the latter has come to pass and though we are not shocked, we are still surprised to see it unfold before us. And, though she was chosen to energize the base, none of us could have imagined the devisiveness that has come to characterize her campaign and by extension, John McCain's. From her mouth has emanated a charged vocabulary with an undercurrent no doubt influenced by her virtual isolation in Alaska.

On the eve of the possible of election of a 1/2 black man as President, America reveals its racial divisions once again for all the world to witness. This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world yet the Republican candidates for Presidency stoke an unspoken but understood prejudice that is seized upon with gusto and widespread support. This is kind of frightening. It reminds me of the division that we had in the democratic primaries where Hilary had to deliver her people to Obama much to the distress of herself and her supporters - an open wound fueled by the competitive division between a white woman and a black man both vying to become the historical first President of their kind. In time, Democrats came around to support the greater good, a Democrat for President.

Now with the increasingly hostile and corrosive campaign that Palin spews and McCain condones, we are left with people who have a more insidious separation, a racial divide rooted in hundreds of years of history that was only equalized by law less than 50 years ago. The very same separation that may cost Obama the election if Americans fail to look beyond race once they hit the voting booth; proving that the Bradley effect is no myth, but reality.