Scary column by Michael Tomasky about McCain’s tolerance of crazed racism and bigotry. It’s the cornered rat syndrome.

It built up over the course of the week, as supporters at the rallies of John McCain and Sarah Palin started randomly screaming “terrorist!” and “off with his head!” and “treason!” and even “kill him!” at the mention of Barack Obama’s name.

Then there was the man at a Florida rally who shouted at an African-American CNN cameraman: “Sit down, boy.” You don’t need to know your history of the American south to know that “boy”, directed at a black man, is overtly and undeniably racist.

[…]

He [McCain] and Palin – “his Sancho Panza”, as George Will mockingly wrote in the Washington Post – are deliberately stoking rage that is based on lies that they know to be lies (well, that at least McCain knows to be lies). The normally reserved commentator David Gergen said: “There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we’re not far from that.”

We are seeing the dark, Gothic heart of resentment conservatism. It’s going to be a disgusting three weeks.

There’s a memorable, beautifully-written editorial in the current New Yorker which perfectly encapsulates the choice facing Americans. It concludes:

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

Elsewhere in the same issue, James Wood has a nice piece about the way the McCain camp has portrayed Obama’s literary and oratorical skills as ‘evidence’ of a character flaw. And then, of course, there’s Palin:

Hearing her being interviewed by Sean Hannity, on Fox News, almost made one wish for a Republican victory in November, so that her bizarre locutions might be available a bit longer to delve into. At times, even Hannity looked taken aback; his eyes, slightly too close to each other, like the headlamps on an Army jeep, went blank, as if registering the abyss we are teetering above. Or perhaps he just couldn’t follow. The most revealing moment happened earlier, when she was asked about Obama’s attack on McCain’s claim that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. “Well,” Palin said, “it was an unfair attack on the verbage that Senator McCain chose to use, because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our workforce, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course that is strong, and that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack there, again, based on verbage that John McCain used.” This is certainly doing rather than mere talking, and what is being done is the coinage of “verbage.” It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language.

Here’s what Joe Stiglitz would like to ask in tonight’s ‘debate’:

1. When the current bailout of Wall Street fails to turn around the economy and reinvigorate credit markets, will you propose another one? How large should it be? Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke have said what is needed is a restoration of confidence in the economy. But won’t the failure of this bailout destroy confidence, with disastrous consequences — as happened in Indonesia and other East Asian countries when similar bailouts failed 10 years ago?

2. More than a million people have lost their homes in the past two years. A million more are expected to lose their homes in the next 12 months or so. Do you support a more direct program of relief for homeowners? The government pays more of the mortgage costs of rich homeowners, through larger tax deductions, than of poorer homeowners. What would you do to correct this injustice?

3. President Bush pushed tougher bankruptcy laws that were supposed to reduce bankruptcy and lower lending costs. But the new laws made it more difficult for ordinary Americans to discharge their debts, and encouraged reckless lending on the part of lenders, who thought they could more easily force poor borrowers to repay. Would you make any changes in the bankruptcy laws? Currently, it is more difficult to restructure a mortgage on a primary residence than other debts. Do you support bankruptcy reforms that would make it easier for people to stay in their homes?

Personally, I like to put these to Sarah Palin.

Timothy Egan, writing in today’s New York Times…

Among the many dispiriting things to come out of Bob Woodward’s quartet of books on George W. Bush is his observation that the president has not changed since he first started talking to Woodward in 2001.

No growth. No evolution. No regrets.

“History,” Bush replied, when asked by Woodward how he would be judged over time. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Broke, as well.

It would have been nice to let Bush’s two terms marinate a while before invoking Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan from the cellar of worst presidents. But then — over the last two weeks — he completed the trilogy of national disasters that will be with us for a generation or more…

Free TV : Ustream

He’s introducing a very good discussion of the US presidential campaign. Panellists include the inimitable Stryker McGuire, Newsweek‘s London Bureau Chief, and the Time photographer who was assigned to the McCain campaign.