John McCain - or rather, his handlers - clearly realize that he has nothing going for him. He has no new ideas or new solutions. His entire campaign is based on continuing the very same policies that have dragged the current president down to historically low opinion ratings and the country into an abyss. He has surrounded himself with Karl Rove acolytes who believe that the only way to win an election is to turn your opponent into a baby-eating, grandparent-murdering monster. And if your opponent is intelligent and charismatic with a lot of good ideas, that makes it all the more challenging.
Hence McCain's latest crop of ads and talking points. His surrogates' claims of "presumptuousness" on Barack Obama's part is really just a thinly-veiled way of calling him an uppity Negro who needs to be taught his place in the world. And his TV ad comparing Obama's "celebrity" status with that of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, known nowadays primarily for boozily forgetting to put on underwear, has been widely derided as appealing to racist fears of black men hooking up with white women.
But his latest web ad goes even further.
Now, at first glance, McCain is satirizing Obama's Great White (as it were) Hope image and taking it to absurd extremes. No big deal, and the Ten Commandments clip is pretty funny in this context. But there is something deeper here.
McCain can't hope to win in November without the support of the Christian Right voters who put every one of Tim LaHaye's ultra-violent Left Behind books at the top of the best-seller list. Now it just so happens that the series' principal villain is a man who comes to power by proclaiming peace and international brotherhood but ends up doing the work of Satan.
In other words, the ad is sneakily calling Barack Obama the Anti-Christ.
Classy.
But maybe that's giving McCain's team too much credit. After all, they thought the "McCain Cribs" web video, which patronized and looked down on the young voters whose support they want, was a good idea. So they might not have actually meant to call Obama the epitome of evil.
Nah, who are we kidding? Of course they meant it. They're trying to reach the people who insist that Obama is some sort of black supremacist secret Muslim, hoping to scare them into voting for a nice white Christian man instead of some black guy with the middle name of "Hussein."
But will they get away with it?
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