John McCain and Sarah Palin turned a corner last week, after the Vice Presidential debate. Palin
managed not to embarrass herself too badly, and therefore was declared
a winner, and apparently ready to be vice president, and possibly
president, without having ever held a single news conference or really
leveled with the American people. But it is the reality of McCain's
campaign that being able to approximate mediocrity is sufficient. With
this amazing feat, Ms. Palin was fully vetted. She was ready to go
forth and snarl.

Losing ground in the polls and without a real
message other than empty rhetoric and the occasional 180 degree turn on
this issue or that, McCain unleashed his minion, and away she went,
doing what she does best - attacking. She's someone who doesn't do well
with "annoying" questions, but she's downright perky while twisting a
knife in your innards, whether you are a moose or a presidential
candidate, and there are certain people who just love her, love her.
There are even some pundits who "sit a little straighter" when she
gives you that old Wasilla wink.

Palin is all hopped up on power now. She feels it. It's gotta be God's will, you betcha.
And she's going to tell her followers how dangerous and scary and
"different" Barack Obama is. How he's "pallin' around with terrorists."
How he doesn't have the vision of America that "we" have.

Palin's
righteous sounding, but unfounded, attacks on Obama apparently resonate
on small minded, bigoted people who are quite likely terrified of
something they can't understand - like a highly accomplished and
obviously superior man who happens to have a shade of skin a few tones
darker than they do. So they'll believe anything. They'll get all
hopped up with Palin and start yelling out all kinds of horrible
chants, like "terrorist" and "kill him." What Palin is doing, and knows
she's doing, is inciting a mob.

Two images come to mind when I
think of what she's doing, one funny and one frightening. The funny one
is the mob scene in the original version of Frankenstein, with all the
villagers storming the castle with their torches. It's funny because
it's fiction, and it's campy. (My friends tell me that Jon Stewart used
a scene just like that on The Daily Show, but I didn't watch it - yet.)


The other image is much worse. It's of Hitler inciting a crowd
to hate Jews, emphasizing their "difference" and making people afraid.
Fear turning to hate.

As an aside, I had a friend who was once a
member of the Dutch Resistance. He was captured and taken to Berlin,
where he was tortured and enslaved by the Nazis. He told only a few
stories from those times, but one of them has always remained in my
mind. He told of being paraded with a group of Nazi slaves in front of
a huge gathering. They were placed at the front of the crowd, while
Hitler took the stage. My friend, who spoke German, listened to Hitler
speak. What he told me was chilling. He said, "Listening to him, it was
clear that he had some kind of power - a charisma. When he spoke,
people stood up. They yelled, 'Sig Heil!' And, what was worse, is that
I could feel it too, from the front row, and I had to restrain myself
from standing up with them."

Palin has something. She has a
natural charisma. She hasn't any wisdom or experience to speak of. She
has a distorted world view and a vicious streak the size of her famous
Alaskan pipeline, but she attracts people and can move people in a way
that McCain never could. So, to me, she's dangerous, because she can
incite people into a hate state. She is doing it now.

The
problem is, whoever wins this presidential election, we are all losers
because of what McCain and Palin are doing now. Let me say that again,
Joe Biden-like. We are all losers.

McCain and Palin are
poisoning the well (an old tactic used in warfare when you were leaving
a territory or forced out. You poisoned the well so that your enemy
could not use it.) They are inciting hatred and possibly violence,
possibly as another desperate strategy to charge up their "base," and
possibly simply as a scorched earth policy. But whatever they are
doing, we are going to be the losers.

We live in a fractured
society with diverse views and beliefs. In fact, the United States has
never been free of prejudice and conflict in its entire history. Great
strides have been made. We've freed the slaves and enfranchised women.
We've fought for civil rights and emerged as a beacon of hope and
equality in the world. But we have never entirely eliminated our
divisions, nor, perhaps should we - as long as we can carry our
different views together for the betterment of all.

But despite
all the gains we have made over more than two centuries, people like
McCain and Palin, and their predecessors, Gingrich, Norquist, Reed,
Cheney, Bush and others, seek to accentuate and inflame our divisions
and set us against each other. Our nation today is more deeply divided,
more deeply partisan, and more critically weakened than it was eight
years ago. And now we have people stirring the pot for nothing more
than political gain. Country first? Give me a break.

So we
lose, because our neighbors will hate each other. We lose because our
leaders (some of them) show that they have no real values, and as
leaders, they are expected to set the standards for our nation. We lose
because, as Abraham Lincoln once said, "A house divided against itself
cannot stand."

Barack Obama has run a campaign centered around
hope, change and healing the divisions. It's clear that his belief in
the American people is profound and positive. It's time for McCain and
Palin to realize that only by promoting unity and peace among us can
they truly put country first.

-Crossposted at Huffington Post