My Campaign Memories

McCAIN RAGE
New Orleans — June 2008
McCain has just given the worst speech of his campaign, a roundly panned halt-and-stammer job on the night Barack Obama first claimed victory over Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Reporters spent much of their time mocking the putrid lime-green backdrop behind McCain, but from where I stood, the crowd was the bigger problem. I'm arguing with a group of three women who insist that Obama's plan to require Americans to buy private health insurance is "socialist." I ask the McCain supporters if they consider the private insurance they have to buy for their car socialism.

"Cars aren't socialist," one woman says.

Hillary's smear-heavy, attack-at-the-knees campaign has morphed seamlessly into McCain's campaign. It is amazing to watch both of these political warriors reach the same political crossroads and make exactly the same doomed bargain for their political lives. Both made their careers as triangulating centrists. Both were previously the victims of some of the dirtiest politics in modern times, with McCain felled by a smear campaign about an illegitimate black daughter, in South Carolina in 2000, and Hillary bashed by right-wingers for her associations with "communist" Bella Abzug and her ties to a "communist front," the National Lawyers Guild.

But when push came to shove, both politicians went completely Tonya Harding on Barack Obama. In an April debate in Philadelphia, the same Hillary who spent her husband's presidency unfairly bashed as a Marxist pariah squawked about Obama's relationship to Bill Ayers, pointing out that Ayers said on 9/11 he wished he had "done more." Months later, McCain said the same thing, wailing about how Ayers wished he had "bombed more." From Jeremiah Wright, to Obama's supposed vote for graphic sex ed for kindergartners, to the photos of Obama in Muslim garb Hillary's camp reportedly sent to the Drudge Report, to the "scandalous" information about Obama Bob Novak claimed the Hillary camp was holding, to Obama's connections to ACORN, to the constant lies and innuendo about Obama being a Muslim (he isn't, "as far as I know," Hillary told 60 Minutes), the Clinton and McCain campaigns were one long, unabashed, scorched-earth attempt at character assassination.

Here in New Orleans, a man is calling Obama dishonest. I ask how. "He exaggerates," he says mysteriously. I again ask how. The problem turns out to be Obama's mention of his white mother and white grandmother, "like that qualifies him to know what it's like to be white."

OBAMA'S CALM
Hempstead, NY — October 2008
At Hofstra University, in the final debate, McCain rails on about Ayers and accuses Obama of voting to deny treatment to fetuses "born alive." In Obama's place, I would have lunged at McCain's throat. But Obama isn't interested in jacking up mine or anyone else's bloodlust. He calmly answers the questions and moves on, simultaneously putting McCain and me in our places.

This is called being better than your supporters, and it's a new thing in modern American politics. Year after year, even the president of our country has been consistently too small and too cheap to stand up and face his problems like a grown-up, forever passing the buck to this or that group of Americans. If it wasn't Reagan crying about "freeloaders" or George H.W. Bush blasting the "apologize for America" crowd, it was the Clintons whining about the "vast right-wing conspiracy."

We were all educated in this culture of blame-the-other-sap, and that's why we Americans are always whining about getting jobbed by someone: the media, Hollywood, Big Tobacco, anybody. But this year, the more the other side whined and pointed fingers, the higher Obama's star climbed. It's reassuring to see that someone in this country is finally doing some growing up. Let's hope that it says as much about us as it does about the presidency.

[From Issue 1065 — November 13, 2008]

Related Stories:

• More from Issue 1065
• Taibbi Unbound: Fresh Broadsides from Rolling Stone Political Writer Matt Taibbi
• Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone