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Even in dirty campaigns such as this one, where half-truths, obfuscation and exaggeration abound (from both sides, mind you), when you challenge the voting public to judge your opponent by what is known of him, you show respect for your audience, your opponent, and the political process. When you do as the McCain campaign has done in these more dire of their campaign days—challenge your audience to judge your opponent by what is not known of him—you show a profound disrespect for humanity.
Let’s give a name to this meme, the implied answer to the question posed by the McCain campaign. Let’s call the meme “Obama is a terrorist” for simplicity’s sake. Of this I’m sure: the McCain campaign is run by smart people who wouldn’t be where they are were it otherwise. The McCain campaign knows that Barack Obama is not a terrorist nor a terrorist sympthaizer, that claims of his faith in and practice of Islam are without any legitimacy, that his ties with people whose past can be characterized as radical are based on nothing other than community building and never destruction. But the McCain campaign knows that there are fringe elements of its audience who don’t know this. And so they allow themselves the luxury of suggesting it by merely posing a question.
Granted, I believe that when McCain asks the question, “What don’t we know about Barack Obama?” his intentions are not to imply that Obama is a terrorist. On the contrary, I believe that McCain is decent enough to have been negatively surprised by the reaction his question received from an audience member in this clip from a rally in New Mexico last week. I believe that when McCain himself asks the question, he intends to simply convey the message that to many, the details of Barack Obama’s policies may be obscured by the magnetism of his personality (which, in itself, is a legitimate suggestion).
But the question, posed with a slightly different and increasingly common intonation, exploits that most dangerous of all human tendencies: to fear the unknown.
Let me be perfectly clear: challenging voters to judge a man based on the unknown is an outright appeal to ignorance.
UPDATE: This, via John Dickerson, is uplifting.
