Uppity Negro

One is a low achieving son of privilege who pulled family connections to get a prized (but dangerous) assignment despite his bottom of the barrel academics, parlayed prisoner of war celebrity into a series of adulterous affairs with flashy women, culminating in marriage to a wealth heiress, and has spent the last quarter of a century in Washington DC mainly in celebrity movie and TV appearances. The other is the mixed race son of an economically disadvantaged single mother who went from academic excellence to a political career starting near the bottom but ascending quickly.

So which one gets labelled elitist? The McCain ads and Republican talking heads pushing this line are so preposterous that it's tempting to assume they are as McCain's mother called them, merely "stupid." This neglects the fact that the products of the Atwater, Rove, Schmidt Republican smear machine are always written in code, a code that is not so obvious to the intellectually sophisticated, but calculated to appeal to America's darker natures. If you translate the word "elitist" into "uppity negro," and remember that the Paris, Britney, Obama ad is intended to suggest the image of the sexually threatening black man, you can see McCain's true and racist face - not the naked old style racism of the 1950's, but Lee Atwater's coded dog whistles of the 60's.

George Will and Donna Brazile were on ABC's Sunday Morning talking heads, and when Will went into the elitist thing, Brazile just looked stunned and mumbled something about it now being bad to get a good education. I wish she had had the guts to call Will out and ask why Bush and McCain, who used family connections to get into (and barely graduate from)elite prep schools and top colleges, are not elitists, while Obama, who got to the top of similar schools on the basis of academic achievement, somehow is. She should have also asked him to stop speaking in code: if he wanted to call Obama an "uppity negro" he should do so out loud like a man instead of peddling nasty insinuations like the lying, weasel wording scum he is. (Was I too subtle there?)

The advantage of the code word attack is (im)plausible deniability. If Obama complains, he projects an image of the agrieved black man. The ABC heads agreed that he needed a junkyard dog to respond to these ads. Dovid Gergen liked Hillary. I'm no fan but he does need somebody, and if Hillary can do it, she might be necessary. He can't afford a vapid Lieberman - Edwards type of VP.

UPDATE: A TPM reader who saw more of the show than I notes that David Gergen had the identical observation:

The good news this morning? God Bless David Gergen! Really--he was on This Week and said (check the video or transcript for exact wording), "When McCain's camp calls Obama "The Messiah" and "The One", he's really calling him "upitty." I'm from the South, and we understand what that means. That's code." Jake Tapper looked like he had been pole axed. Donna Brazille knew what he was talking about, of course. But GS, George Will, and Tapper had to be bluntly told the the way the world works by Mr. Blandly Bi-partisan...

TPM has the video at the link.

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