America has been changing fast demographically of late — nearly a third of Americans are under the age of 20, and nearly a third are now either black or Hispanic — but you wouldn’t have known it from the mainly old and overwhelmingly white crowd gathered in the Xcel Energy Center in St Paul, Minnesota, on Thursday evening to cheer on Republican nominee John McCain, at 72 the oldest candidate ever to run for US president. (Conspicuously absent was Colin Powell.)
And it wasn’t only the crowd. Blacks and Hispanics are heavily overrepresented in the US Armed Services, but the six standard bearers of Old Glory and the various branches — Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and National Guard — who marched in silence onto the stage at the beginning of the evening’s proceedings were all white. As were the eight or ten past Olympians who joined them — never mind that the glory of US Olympics’ squads has, till recently, been its black sprinters. (Perhaps Michael Johnson, Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses declined invitations to attend, but one doubts it.)
White, too, was the Greek Orthodox archbishop (“See? We descend from the Greeks!” seemed the message here) who called on the Almighty to protect America both at home and while it spread freedom to — ie, invaded — other countries. And white, of course, was the country-and-western singer who serenaded McCain when the proceedings ended.
The import of the visuals couldn’t be clearer — especially given that Mr McCain’s current bête noire (we-e-ll), the imperturbable Goliath to his desperate, last-minute makeover as David, was the Golden Boy.
And then there was the commander-in-chief talk, and the iconography of war, war.
To an outsider, the aforementioned Armed Services’ procession at a party convention seemed odd enough. And it was followed by:
Senator Lindsay Graham, who spoke only about commanders-in-chief and America’s struggle with its “enemies,” and who credited the decline in violence in Iraq entirely to The Surge, and The Surge entirely to John McCain
A video of 9-11, so harrowingly graphic that even Wolf Blitzer, that good and faithful servant of whatever’s ‘Hap-pen-ing n-a-o-w,’ looked worried. (Next morning, a Daily Kos blogger called the video ‘pornographic,’ and Keith Olberman observed that if his channel had opted to show it there would have been massive viewer denunciations of MSNBC’s “tastelessness”)
McCain’s address, in which he abruptly abandoned his pitch of ‘experience’ (a word he used only three times), while trying to seize from Obama the platform of ‘change’ (10 times), before falling back on the only ground that, one senses, matters to him, and exhorting his supporters to “Fight… Fight… Fight!” (25 times).
And all this came on the heels of McCain’s galvanic announcement of a foxy but quite unknown young woman, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, as his running mate.
Now Palin, it quickly emerged, is a rightwing ideologue who strongly shares the Bush-McCain determination to increase domestic oil drilling. She’s also a Creationist, and a militant ‘pro-lifer’ who opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest. And while the mayor of a small Alaskan town she looked into the possibility of getting certain books banned or removed from the town’s library.
She also evidently mistrusts the world beyond America: the most telling thing about Sarah Palin, in this columnist’s view, is that – just like GW Bush when he first assumed the US presidency – she has only ever travelled out of the States once — and that was to visit Alaskan troops in Kuwait last year. It’s hard to imagine a more depressing sign of a complacent, closed, incurious mind.
In short, Sarah Palin isn’t, as she’s tried to imply, a second Hillary, but an Anti-Hillary, in everything bar gender; and on Friday the New York senator pointed this out. “After listening to all the speeches this week,” Clinton said, “I heard nothing that suggests the Republicans are ready to fix the economy for middle-class families, provide quality affordable health care for all Americans, guarantee equal pay for equal work for women, restore our nation’s leadership in a complex world or tackle the myriad of challenges our country faces. So, to slightly amend my comments from Denver: NO WAY, NO HOW, NO McCAIN-PALIN.”
But Palin is also a moose-hunter, an outdoorswoman; and she likes big guns.
In short, Sarah Palin is the walking wet dream of the Republicans’ guns-and-churches hordes, and as such she’s clearly a big vote-getter for McCain. At the Republican convention she energized the base as McCain could never have done; and she’s sure also to play well in Peoria and the depressed Appalachian outlands.
Besides, she’s foxy! A funny video posted on YouTube zeroes in on old warrior McCain’s distracted look as — standing behind his new running mate while she introduces herself at the podium — he glances down repeatedly at Ms Palin’s bottom. (Another video catches the ex-beauty queen’s squeamish expression as she submits to her grizzled mentor’s bear hug.)
But that’s not all. Palin is also the centerpiece of what’s a radical new campaign by McCain: a hard last-minute swerve to the right, to resume the culture war — the ‘values war’ — that has served Republican candidates since Nixon so well. It’s what Paul Krugman called in Friday’s NYT “The Resentment Strategy”:
“The Republican Party,” warned Krugman, “…is firmly in the hands of the angry right…What’s the source of all that anger? Some of it, of course, is driven by cultural and religious conflict: fundamentalist Christians are sincerely dismayed by Roe v Wade and evolution in the curriculum. [But] much of [it] is based not on the claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the perception that Democrats look down their noses at regular people. Thus Mr Giuliani asserted that Wasilla, Alaska, isn’t “flashy enough” for Mr Obama, who never said any such thing. And Ms Palin asserted that Democrats “look down” on small-town mayors — again, without any evidence. What the GOP is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you.
Taken in sum, the message of the final night of the Republican Convention was startlingly clear. It was a cry-out to America’s demographically-imperilled ruling tribe of WASPS, and it sought to gather up white Americans to the bosom of the Republican Party; to frighten the hell out of them (that awful 9-11 video!); and then to urge them to “Fight!… Fight!… Fight!” Talk about a last redoubt!
And it would have been awesome, if one had only lost sight of what awaited that doomed crowd in the new, and the wider, America — an America typified by those 80,000 Democrats sitting, like an army encamped, under the stars in Mile High Stadium in Denver the previous week listening to Barack Obama’s stirring, no-nonsense address.
The Democrats are in no mood to open the door even a crack and let McCain in. In the 24 hours after Ms Palin won her spurs with the Republican base by showering smiling meanness and contempt upon the Golden Boy, they gave up $10 million—$10 million! — in contributions to Obama.
