In recent posts, Marshall and Gitlin are pointing to the increasing use of racial innuendo by the McCain campaign. This is their only route to victory, and there is little question that they have figured out how to do it well with minimally expensive ad buys that get the 24-hour media folks blabbering: presumptuousness, uncaring to troops, images of black candidate near beautiful young white women. McCain also, not incidentially, took a move last week to get lots of "McCain rejects affirmative action" headlines before the low-attention public. He is successfully playing on white fears of a black candidate, no doubt.
BUT -- here is the point -- McCain will ALSO succeed brilliantly if bloggers and pundits and media heads start blabbering about racism right now. That will bring race front and center to the campagin, exactly what Rove-McCain want! In addition, McCain benefits a lot from the whining responses of Axelrod and the Obama campaign. They keep saying "this is not the John McCain we know," not the "honorable John McCain." That is a very weak response and all it does is validate that, underneath, McCain supposedly IS honorable. This approach will allow McCain to take the low road this summer - smearing his opponent in August, just like they did with Kerry four years ago -- and then "rediscover" his basically honorable self for the closing phases of the campaign after Labor Day, when of course there will be a foreign policy crisis manufactured to play to his supposed strengths.
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