New Medias Influence On Politics

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All this crystallized for me when Rove went into a rant about Obama’s minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I set Rove off by observing an obvious fact, for me anyway, of American elections: White candidates can get away with sleazy associations, and black candidates can’t. Both John and Robert Kennedy met politely with Alabama governor George Wallace during his Stand in the Schoolhouse Door phase. Ronald Reagan opened his fall campaign in 1980 by appearing as an honored guest at the Neshoba County Fair, in Mississippi, where Governor Ross Barnett in years past gave his annual race-baiting speech—a festive event held only a stone’s throw from the muddy grave where Barnett’s constituents buried three bullet-riddled civil-rights workers in 1964. As recently as this year, Times columnist David Brooks naively assured his readers that the ­Gipper didn’t mean any harm by his richly symbolic appearance at a location closely linked to segregationist politics.

Black candidates are held to a different standard in regard to their associates and not just by party apologists like Brooks. The mainstream press can be depended on to demand that any black candidate, for sheriff or president, disown every controversial thing said or done by every black man since Nat Turner’s rebellion. Rove, of course, pointed out that tolerating a racist preacher, as Obama did, is different from cozying up to racist politicians, and he’s right. Wright has never had the legal authority to block state prosecution of Klan murderers, as Wallace routinely did back in his days of hobnobbing with presidents.

Rove ridiculed Obama at length for suggesting a moral equivalence between black and white racism. “We’re all morally equivalent to a guy who says ‘Goddamn America’ and AIDS was a virus concocted by the government as a genocidal tool,” Rove said. To make matters worse, he added that Obama “then concludes by suggesting that the morally equivalent black and white anger ought to find its outlet against the real enemy, which is corporate America.”

Rove’s outburst was notable, I told the audience, “because you’ve just heard the Republican campaign in a nitroglycerin tablet,” should Obama get the nomination. Actually, I was dazzled by the cogency of Rove’s case against Obama. Clearly, if perhaps unintentionally, he had outlined a G.O.P. swift-boat game plan, updated for the 2008 general-election campaign. Obama’s crazy preacher and the candidate’s sociological observations about guns, religion, and working-class bitterness have given the G.O.P.’s video pistoleros all the fodder they need for the television commercials you’ll see after Labor Day.

Within 24 hours, two seasoned campaign survivors—one a veteran correspondent for a Northeastern newspaper, the other a battle-scarred Republican consultant—assured me that my analysis was basically right. Rove’s remarks might easily serve as a blueprint for the anti-Obama television ads in the fall campaign. Of course, John McCain and the Republican National Committee will condemn those ads. Even so, the commercials will run relentlessly, funded by Republican “527s”—the supposedly independent groups named for the section of the federal tax code that allows these officially “independent” groups to stab the other party’s candidate without their guy’s getting blood on his hands. And throughout the fall, the press will dutifully publicize one of the great fictions of American campaigning: Our presidential nominees—one of whom will go forth to negotiate with the Chinese, the Russians, and the Arabs—actually lack the persuasive skills to get their own supporters to withdraw the “independent” commercials the candidates supposedly detest.

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