Yeah, it scares me too:
I’m starting to get concerned for Obama’s safety on the campaign trail. Here’s Joe Klein of TIME on the tenor of the McCain rallies:
But seriously, folks, I’m beginning to worry about the level of craziness on the Republican side, the over-the-top, stampede-the-crowd statements by everyone from McCain on down, the vehemence of the crowds that McCain and Palin are drawing with people shouting “Kill him” and “He’s a terrorist” and “Off with his head.”
Watch the tape of the guy screaming, “He’s a terrorist!” McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes… and I thought for a moment he’d admonish the man. But he didn’t. And now he’s selling the Ayres non-story full-time. Yes, yes, it’s all he has. True enough: he no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn’t done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling, as the New York Times editorial board said today-and more, it is a national disgrace.
It has not been that far back in my memory to the angry year of 1968, and the assassinations of King and RFK by nutballs, or the shooting of Wallace, or that terrible day in Dallas. I remember them all. I don’t need another. I understand that McCain’s people think that the economy is a losing issue for him, as the people who might have not voted for Obama on the basis of his race are voting for him for their future and their pocketbooks. But baiting the crowds with hatred and nonsense to drive up the base vote is horrible.
David Frum, the conservative columnist in National Review says:
American voters are staggering under the worst financial crisis since at least 1982. Asset values are tumbling, consumer spending is contracting, and a recession is visibly on the way. This crisis follows upon seven years in which middle-class incomes have stagnated and Republican economic management has been badly tarnished. Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is … to put it mildly … severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues.
We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama’s associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don’t care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.
Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser.
Unless, of course, you don’t give a damn for anything aside of winning in any way possible.