#887 War of the Words

The election is over.
It was a long, hard, and interesting push. Both campaigns got in their licks and both held back in some areas. Palin was supposedly chomping at the bit to mention Jeremiah Wright, but McCain wouldn’t go there.
Perhaps it was because he knew that if he pulled out that last stop, the Obama camp would unleash a torrent of information about Palin’s association with the anti-American Alaska secessionist party. Talk about pallin’ around with terrorists, how about Palin around with terrorists. These Alaska separatists had some “I hate America” slogans every bit as inflammatory as Jeremiah Wright.
It was an interesting tactic of the Obama campaign not to use the Alaska secessionists to bomb the William Ayers insinuations.
Towards the end of the campaign, there was an interesting flap though. You could see the Karl Rove tactic of turning your own things on your head and hitting you with them.
Like when the McCain campaign took a comment about “spreading” the wealth, turned it into a comment about “redistributing” the wealth, and from that started calling Obama a socialist.
Then in the debates, John McCain took Obama’s eloquence head on by insinuating that eloquence was suspect in some way. He did this by putting finger-waving air-quotes around the word.
After four years of the non-eloquence of Bush, it may not have been a good tactic to pick on someone who could string eight words together. Even more so, when his running mate seemed similarly challenged in the coherent sentence structure department.
And that was what the flap was about. One of the final Obama commercials showed McCain a couple of years ago, saying in his own words that he knew nothing about economics and would need to trust his future vice president for that. The commercial ends with a picture of Palin winking in her inimitable “you betcha” manner.
Devastating.
Immediately the roving right wing attack dogs started yelling, “Unfair!”
Yeah, she spent the last 8 weeks calling Obama an un-American terrorist elitist socialist and they showed a picture of her winking.
Unfair and Unbalanced, if you ask me.
America, ya gotta love it.