I, too, am repelled by behavior of McCain street people and also by many
enthusiasts who are not just his street people. E.J. Dionne rightly takes them
to task in an adjoining space. I also suspect that, as the defeat of their
candidate becomes more vivid and almost tactile, they will become desperate:
more ugliness will be the result.
But the grace of a candidate, even a
winning candidate, doesn't rub off on many of his supporters. Barack Obama has,
for example, what most of us think been extremely gracious to his opponent. He
must have noticed, at the last debate certainly, that John McCain is, at best,
more than a bit dotty. But he's never suggested that in public.
Assuredly, I could never have trusted Sarah Palin to serve as vice
president, to say nothing of her serving as numero uno. She is both creepy and
nuts. But I did have a warm spot for McCain: his love of country, his
unpredictability and, yes, his courage. He still has these traits. So we come
back to his dottiness, and it is this that I think allowed him to choose such a
woefully bad character as his running-mate.
The campaign goes on,
however. And so, before we get too righteous about their nutcases, let us look
at some of our own. Here, off youtube, are Obama supporters behaving like,
well, yes, nutcases. What's more, the setting is the upper west side of New
York City, a weekend street fair on Columbus Avenue, north of Lincoln Square up
to 96th Street. This is Obama territory. Lots of PhDs, shrinks and customers
of shrinks, readers of the New York Review, mostly Jews, liberals for sure, with
fantasies of persecution by the Feds. A group of McCain supporters walks into
their midsts. They go bananas, ugly bananas. Actually, uglier than the man who
carried an effigy of Barack Obama as Curious George. You get it? Yes, a
monkey. Ha, ha.
And, as it happens, I don't think Sarah Silverman trying to get her bubby and zaideh to vote for
Obama was too respectful of her bubby and zaideh.