I'm actually sympathetic to Ross Douthat's frustration in this post. It's true that perfectly anodyne attacks on Barack Obama can be read as racist, even if that wasn't the intended assault. But attacks are in the eyes of the beholder. Like the pop-quantum physics finding that light can be both a wave or a particle depending on observation, an attack can be racist or mundane depending on the audience. And the audience for McCain's attacks happens to have a lot of racists in it. Matt Yglesias made this argument well yesterday, but to make just one more point, it's now fairly broadly believed that McCain's path to victory relies on Pennsylvania. And I don't know anyone who believes that in the unlikely event of a McCain win in Pennsylvania, the winning margin won't be provided by racists. Ross is annoyed that liberals insist on reading attacks as racist, but in most cases, liberals aren't doing that. They're reading the response as racist. And they're probably right about that. The fact of racist conservatives rather sucks for non-racist conservatives. Which is why it would have been good if McCain had made more of a point of denouncing racists within his own coalition. In the Democratic primary debates, John Edwards frequently said that if his supporters were voting against Obama's race or Clinton's gender, he didn't want their vote. By contrast, when confronted with racist behavior at his rallies at one of the presidential debates, McCain replied, "let me just say, categorically, I'm proud of the people that come to our rallies." Then he attacked John Lewis for awhile. That's not to say that McCain is racist, or the bulk of his supporters are racist. But racism exists in his coalition, and it would be harder for liberals to bring it up if McCain had been more aggressive in tamping it down. But rather than reject it, McCain has tried to ignore it, which has led lots of folks to conclude that he wants to quietly benefit from it. So it gets brought up a lot.
