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6. The 2008 Campaign
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142 Near the end of the 2008 presidential campaign, a young white woman working for John McCain in western Pennsylvania appeared with a backward B carved on her cheek. Ashley Todd said she had been sexually assaulted and mutilated by a black mugger six feet, four inches tall who might have been working for Obama. Immediately the Drudge Report featured Ashley Todd’s accusation, right-wing blogs trumpeted the story, newspapers published it, and the McCain campaign pushed it. The campaign’s Pennsylvania communications director told reporters that the B stood for Barack. By that evening McCain had telephoned Ashley Todd to express his sympathy and Sarah Palin had called her family. But the next day the conservative New York Post had a page-one headline:“B is for Bulls___.” Pittsburgh police had discovered the story was a hoax. After taking a lie detector test and giving conflicting stories, the disturbed 20-year-old confessed that she had probably mutilated herself in her car but couldn’t remember doing it, so she blamed it on her fantasy of a black Obama worker. The B was backward because she had been looking in the car mirror. Within a day, the story of the black beast and the defenseless white woman had fallen apart. Or rather, it had a second life. Rebranded, it served left-leaning commentators as a prime example of the race-baiting tactics used by the McCain campaign, especially in its last few weeks. As many people noted, 100 years earlier white people would have lynched someone, chapter 6 The 2008 Campaign the 2008 campaign 143 anyone, so long as he was black, no questions asked.1 In Hawaii, too, as my second chapter mentions, the 1931–1932 Massie trials featured a young white woman who claimed that she had been raped by several “black” men. For months, the nation’s media and politicians avidly focused on protecting white women, not on questioning her false accusation or even on sympathizing with the dark-skinned youth her white defenders had killed. So there has been racial progress. The calls to affirm white honor by avenging an unsubstantiated attack on a white woman have a much shorter half-life. Calls for action to defend white purity against black beasts are much more likely to be seen as the product of fantasy than they used to be, though such charges still get cultural traction. Yet Americans still love to witness flaming and shaming on talk radio and the web, on late-night TV shows, and in runaway movie successes such as Borat. What Van Jones has called “the ‘gotcha’ bullies” get instant media attention.2 Where such shaming proliferates, concerns about honor loom in the background, now in more race-neutral forms. Though playing the race card now invites public humiliation, the role of shaming in securing the honor of small or large groups persists. The kind of mockery we see from TV “news” comics such as Jon Stewart on the left and commentators such as Bill O’Reilly on the right elevates a cosmopolitan or embattled Us and makes scapegoats of a provincial, hypocritical, or immoral Them. John McCain’s Lineage The union of whiteness with national honor has had a long political life, and it still has a radioactive presence in the Republican South. The 2008 presidential election became a referendum on its persistence, personified in Senator John McCain. A war hero who survived five years of imprisonment by the North Vietnamese with his dignity mostly intact, McCain has often proclaimed his belief in personal and national honor and vigorously supported the second Iraq War to avenge 9/11. In 2005 he courageously broke with President Bush to assail the administration’s de facto sponsorship of torture. McCain had experienced torture personally and knew what humiliation felt like. He [3.135.202.224] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 06:36 GMT) 144 honor bound was appalled that American leaders could degrade his country’s honor to the level of the terrorists. McCain continues to celebrate America’s multiethnic strengths. But running for president can bind a candidate to his base. McCain admirably resisted that pressure in 2000, and failed. In 2008 he won the Republican nomination by appealing to voters who held on tight to racialized honor. McCain’s campaign managers tried to inflame voters’ anxieties about the prospect of a brown-skinned president without making his supporters feel racist. The Republican “Southern Strategy” had worked...