You know what time it is when the gloves start swinging at rallies, the mud starts flying around the Internet, interesting photos start appearing in your mailbox (just wait), and the fact-checking staffs with the daily papers decide to take an early vacation. It's gutter time, and this year promises to become the best (or rather, worst) one ever.
Ever been in a gutter? It's not the prettiest place to land after your candidate has spent years of his or her life preparing for this moment. Every candidate wants to end on a high note. Every candidate aspires to inspire us to believe again, hope again, can-do again. And every last one of them hopes their vision will lead us to the promised land of a better America in a more hopeful tomorrow.
But when the gutter season begins, it's hard for anyone to hear what the candidates are trying to tell us. It's hard to hear what they have to say about improving our lives, putting the country back on track or taking on the mounting deficits, fiscal and trade. The candidates and their campaigns are too busy thrashing each other, inciting hateful mob scenes and, worse, wasting precious time and energy trying to implode their opponent.
The McCain camp is now the gutter-season poster child.
His campaign has made it clear, repeatedly, that it will conjure up fear, sow divisions, incite riotous behavior and provoke hostilities just to win a few poisoned votes.
How sad, especially since this is the same candidate who, in 2000, was the recipient of some of the most vicious political attacks ever waged, up until that point, in a presidential campaign by people inside his own party. And when you hear Cindy McCain, who also had to endure vicious attacks on her character and family in 2000, unleash her maternal fury on Barack Obama for a Senate vote that made her "blood run cold" -- a vote identical to her husband's -- you know the McCain campaign is now in full gutter mode.
Guess what? We have not heard the last of these attacks: the snarky guilt by association, the false charges of "palling around with a terrorist," the ever-popular game of Who is a Better Patriot and the most insidiously evil one of all, dehumanizing your worthy opponent by referring to him, a fellow member of the U.S. Senate, as "that one."
The red-hot McCain rhetoric will get even louder, and his attacks more vile and vitriolic, as the days count down and the lights go out in state after state, and the final tally comes in.
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