 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Senator John McCain
(April 2008)
The TV ad placed by a Republican group in North Carolina, ostensibly
attacking Democratic officials who had endorsed Barrack Obama, was pretty
mild by past and even current standards of attack ad sleaze. The ethical
objections to it would be 1) that it is faintly racist, simply because
it dwells on the pulpit gyrations and rantings of Senator Obama’s “spiritual
advisor” Rev. Jeremiah Wright, 2) that the ad’s final message that Obama
is “too extreme,” in the context of the Wright video, is code for “too
black,” 3) the ad is disingenuous, pretending to be aimed at two white
Democrats when it is clearly aimed at Obama, and 4) it is another manifestation
of Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos,” in which Republicans try to manipulate
the Democrats’ hapless nomination process to produce maximum discord
and confusion. The Scoreboard is in agreement with objections two through four. I
confess wariness about the tendency, usually fully supported by the
media, to characterize any unflattering video of an African-American
figure as “racist,” even when the figure himself is racist, like Rev.
Wright, and when any unflattering implications are 100% deserved. The
fact that he is African-American is absolutely relevant to Wright, as
he is a proven advocate of black hatred and suspicion of whites, and
Obama’s long tolerance and tacit support for his positions is and will
remain an important issue, much as the senator’s supporters attempt
to minimize its significance. (An aside: is there a more blatant embodiment
of right-wing paranoia about the news media than Public Broadcasting’s
Bill Moyers? In his cringingly obsequious interview of Wright, Moyers
allowed the Reverend to claim that his most inflammatory statements
caught on videotape were taken “out of context,” without asking the
obvious and necessary question: what “context” justifies the contention
that the U.S. government developed the AID virus to kill blacks, exactly?)
But never mind: what matters is that the ad was misleading and offensive.
Senator McCain demanded that it be stopped, and it was. He is injecting
a sense of fairness and integrity into the campaign at an early stage,
and raises at least the hope that if his opposition is Mr. Obama, the
two of them may manage to elevate campaign tactics well above the gutter
level that it descended to in 2004. If his opposition is the Clintons, obviously there is no hope whatever.
E-mail: ProEthics President
