David McReynolds
LEFT LETTERS

21 October 2008

The McCain campaign is in total disarray

David McReynolds was on the staff of the War Resisters League for many years, and, as the Socialist Party candidate in 1980 and 2000, the first openly gay person to run for the U.S. presidency. He lives with two cats on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

As we approach the day of election, and (in my view) it becomes clear that the mandate of heaven has fallen, the McCain campaign is in total disarray. It is more than mud - it some cases it is categorical lying that passes anything I can remember.

The charge that Obama is a socialist, the absurd charges against ACORN, the lifting up of the Bill Ayers charges, (as if Obama belonged to some secret cabal of Chicago terrorists), and now rumors that the McCain camp may raise the Rev. Wright matter, it is clear the Republican Party will not go gently into that good night, nor leave the stage with dignity.

Nothing has worked, and the McCain camp sinks deeper into the mud. (I cannot believe McCain himself has really totally or thoughtfully approved of all these attacks - I think they are the mark of extreme disorientation, not careful plotting, and also a mark of normally decent men who are frustrated, worn out, caught up in the paranoia of their own making).

Decent conservatives are leaving the ship, not because it is sinking, but because it is a sinking into a moral swamp.

There are lots of problems with the Obama "camp", and I'll get a column done on that in my EdgeLeft op ed before the election. But nothing compares to the sickening end of this campaign.

Thoughtful Republicans need to ask why Powell has come out for Obama, and has so carefully sliced and diced the GOP campaign in the process, and need to ask why papers, such as the Chicago Tribune, have come out for Obama. It is not a matter simply of people rushing to Obama. It is also a matter of people rushing away from McCain and Palin.

As a socialist I will not vote for Obama, and that issue I'll also take up in an EdgeLeft op ed next week. But while I'm ironically amused that the McCain campaign may yet give socialism a good name, I am sorry that John McCain, whose career has had moments of honor, and who, on the campaign trial has had flashes of decency, will see his life end in tatters. What he has done is far beneath him.

This editorial from the Los Angeles Times (McCain's old voter-fraud saw)
suggests that my dismay at the internal hysteria of the McCain camp is shared by responsible papers.

Perhaps as the day of the election comes, people should gather at the polling places, not only to vote, but to guard and protect. It is my assumption that the Obama camp is smart enough to enlist every honest attorney in the country to fight ballot fraud. But demonstrations for a fair count, as close as possible to the polling places, would not be out of order.



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