This post is about prejudice -- pure simple prejudice.The worst sort of prejudice and how a candidate can use it to his advantage. I keep wondering how McCain can be so close to Obama in the election when everything says it should be a landslide for the Democrats. Here, in all its sordid puffery, is the the monster that makes it so.

A good friend sent me a wonderful post, This is Your Nation on White Privilege by Tim Wise. (Alas, this is not a public document. You have to get free access to it by registering on the site.) In a semi-satirical way, he pokes at what I was trying to say yesterday about racism's ugly head in this election. Sen Obama is clearly being held to a much higher standard than either Republican opponent. Some examples:

• White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.
• White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.
• White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.

This is racism -- pure simple racism. And the country may well suffer the cruel consequences of that racism. Nations fail for such reasons.

Truthiness Stages a Comeback, an editorial by Frank Rick in today's NY Times, lays out with references just how McCain has twisted facts over the years. Rick notes:

For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain, using Rovian tactics, has managed to largely pull it off. The NY TImes/CBS poll that I have discussed several timtes recently shows that he has managed to retain the public trust. Wise is right; if you are black, you are held to a higher standard.

RIch notes that a McCain spokesman told poliitco that they were not concerned about what the media tries to say because they were going over the heads of the media. Rephrased, if you tell a lie often enough and you don't get sharply held to the truth, you can make people believe it. Palin does it with her bridge to nowhere and McCain does it with Obama will raise your taxes. Each are lies. Still, they keep repeating it and some people believe it.

I was wondering when someone in the press would point out the sordid history of "McCain’s chief financial surrogate", Carla Florina. Those who followed her mismanagement at HP closely would know that she probably wasn't qualified to run either a large company or hold high office. She used many of the same tactics there that Palin has used to spin her misadventures in public office. She sure does sound good on TV when she tells us what a wonderful pair McCain and Palin are and why we should avoid those miscreants Obama and Biden.

Rich closes with the following:

The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.

I hope not.

Nicholas Kristof writes that the campaign to pain Obama as a Muslim is working. About 1/3 of voters have believe it. "In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process."

The odd thing is that Obama is more active in church than McCain is. Obama excelled in school whereas McCain did not. Obama never dumped his wife after an affair whereas McCain did. Obama has shown coolness and quiet competence whereas McCain has been profane and has an explosive temper. These are all Christian Values. By a fair standard not tarnished by racial prejudice, Obama should walk away with the white, Christian vote that he is now so far behind in.

Kristof believes that "religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian. ... Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle. We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome."

We have seen these tactics work in 2004. Bush, whose military record is spotty at best, and Cheney, who received five draft deferments, managed to paint John Kerry, who was awarded the silver star -- one of the highest military awards, as the less patriotic American. They managed to do the same in 2002 when Saxby Chambliss manage to convince the voters of Georgia that Max Cleland, a triple amputee veteran, was not as good on national defense as he was. Even John McCain noted, "[I]t's worse than disgraceful, it's reprehensible."

In the 1960 election, John Kennedy managed to overcome the Nixon attempt to use Kennedy's religion against him. History showed just how right the nation was a decade later when Nixon became the only president to resign. Let us hope that Obama can overcome the racial prejudice festered by his opponent's campaign.