Aug. 5, 2008--"Uppity" used to be the preferred term for Negroes who didn't know their place. There was a time when it was regularly applied to any number of black men and women who strived to be more than day laborers, nannies or sharecroppers.
The GOP, ever aware of the connotative power of words, has steered clear of the direct usage of that loaded term. When they speak of Barack Obama—a man in pursuit of the most lofty of prizes—they simply use the words that define the term. Snobbish. Arrogant. Presumptuous.
Obama's opponent, sensing an opening, launched a campaign ad last week, in which the underlying theme, "look at the uppity black man," will no doubt resonate with a certain segment of the audience. McCain's ad interspersed photos of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton—two icons of vapidity—with a smug-looking Obama surrounded by throngs of adoring white people (liberal Europeans).
Conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer summed up the sentiment that provided the basis for the McCain ad in a July 18 piece titled "The Audacity of Vanity," in which he criticized Obama for speaking at the Bradenburg Gate and ridiculed him as "a man of profoundly limited achievement." He went on to suggest: "For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is? We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when 'our planet began to heal.' As I recall—I'm no expert on this—Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas."
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For now, the greater public doesn't appear to be buying it. In the latest national CNN poll, about the same percentage—one third—of respondents believed both Obama and McCain were arrogant.
The fact that the mainstream media has embraced the uppity-Obama storyline is further evidence of the right's ability to advance whatever preposterous storyline it chooses, despite its persistent whining about the liberal media.
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Forward to the present: By feigning indignation and accusing Obama of "playing the race card," McCain returns to the politics of expediency. No, McCain didn't run that ad because he doesn't like black people. No one really believes that anyway. So the "race card" retort is just a straw-man, debating tactic—that is, misrepresenting an opponent's argument and then shooting that argument down.
McCain ran the ad because he knows there are a lot of white people who are inclined to believe the worst in a black politician. (Ask any reporter who's been on the campaign trail what many blue-collar white voters in places like Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio are saying about Obama.) That's political expediency. Not racism.
McCain employs highly skilled media people. They know exactly the kind of reaction his ad would evoke from a certain segment of the electorate. Maureen Dowd said it well in her Sunday column this week, pointing out that in a recent New York Times poll that only 31 percent of white voters said they had a favorable opinion of Obama compared to 83 percent of blacks who did. She drew the conclusion that "the prejudice is visceral: Many Americans, especially blue collar, still feel uneasy about the Senate's exotic shooting star."
Republican accusations of elitism against Democrats are nothing new (the John Kerry wind-surfing hullabaloo being the latest example in a presidential election). But they will take on added resonance this year against Obama, a candidate whom many voters will be already inclined to dislike.
Is he? Probably, yes. Then again, what politician isn't a little bit of all three? It takes a special kind of gall to suggest that you should be the leader of the free world. John McCain, who has run for president twice, should know that as well as anyone.
