A lot has been said about this new wave of “Republican Rage” that has manifested in a few people shouting unforuntate things at McCain/Palin rallies. If this is a genuine right-wing mirror of the “Angry Left” was have seen over the last 8 years, this is not good. James Taranto analyzes this kind of thing better than anyone:
For years this column has chronicled the follies and outrages of the Angry Left. If we are now seeing the emergence of an Angry Right, that is not a good sign for either the country or those on the conservative and Republican sides of the ideological and partisan divides.
Political hatred is not only wrong, it is counterproductive. As we observed in 2005, “one reason Democrats failed to unseat President Bush was that they were blinded by their hatred for him. This made them overconfident, as they mistook their emotions for facts.”
Furthermore, expressions of hatred are unattractive to those who do not share the feeling–a category that presumably includes almost all of the independent and undecided voters who will end up deciding the election. For the Obama campaign and its allies in the media, then, the Angry Right’s behavior is an opportunity: a chance to make the other side–including the McCain campaign itself–look like a bunch of scary wackos.
Thus, this afternoon we got an email from good old John Kerry titled “John McCain’s ugly campaign”:
The reports are piling up of ugliness at the campaign rallies of John McCain and Sarah Palin. Audience members hurl insults and racial epithets, call out “Kill Him!” and “Off With His Head,” and yell “treason” when Senator Obama’s name is mentioned. I strongly condemn language like this which can only be described as hate-filled.
According to reports, every ad paid for by the John McCain campaign is now a negative ad–every single one!
Similarly, the San Francisco Chronicle piece we quoted portrays the entire McCain campaign as racist. “Veiled Racism Seen in New Attacks on Obama,” the headline declares, adopting the passive-aggressive voice. The argument is weak. It conflates legitimate criticism of Obama with hateful slander, and it doubtless reflects the author’s own prejudices. But the behavior of the Angry Right is the best evidence that there is something to those prejudices.
If Barack Obama is elected president, we fear the Angry Right will become angrier and less inhibited, just as the Angry Left did when President Bush and the Republicans were ascendant. It will be an embarrassing time to be a conservative–and Obama, like other presidents who were widely hated by the opposite side (Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush), may find himself a favorite for re-election as a result.
Yet there is a danger in all this for a President Obama as well. In retrospect it seems to us that the Angry Left helped drown out intelligent, and potentially constructive, criticism of the Bush administration and its policies. This produced its own sort of overconfidence.
Hurricane Katrina was surely the turning point. The things the left said about the administration’s handling of the disaster were absurdly over the top, as this column noted repeatedly at the time. But that did not mean the administration conducted itself well or even adequately–and that is the standard to which the public holds its leaders. In politics, a stupid opposition can be a curse as well as a blessing.
It’s something the Right definitely needs to be on-guard about.
But is it real? Is it a widespread sentiment, or just a few isolated kooks? And has the reporting of it been remotely accurate? We’ve all heard McCain implore his supporters not to fear Obama, but the question that provoked his response was far from deranged, and the questioner was obviously exaggerating when he said was afraid of Obama. If anything, why isn’t McCain’s very open rejection of fear and other lies about Obama going to his credit, while Obama has not said a word about the kind of hate and violence perpetrated by his supporters?
I know there is a lot of frustration right now amongst conservatives, but most of it is aimed at McCain and the Media for failing to be as critical of Obama as they should be.
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