Hullabaloo

Friday, October 26, 2012

 
Sununu and the dogwhistle strategy

by digby

It's hard to know if Romney campaign chair John Sununu is a racist himself or if he's just been given the racist dogwhistle assignment in the campaign. But either way, he carries the message with gusto, as he did on Piers Morgan's show last night:

SUNUNU: You have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or that he’s got a slightly different reason for President Obama.

MORGAN: What reason would that be?

SUNUNU: Well, I think that when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being President of the United States — I applaud Colin for standing with him.

Think Progress compiled some of his earlier gems:

– Obama is foreign. Obama doesn’t understand the “American system” because “he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia, and, frankly, when he came to the U.S. he worked as a community organizer, which is a socialized structure.” [Fox News, 7/17/2012]

– Obama doesn’t know how to be an American. During a conference call, Sununu claimed, “The men and women all over America who have worked hard to build these businesses, their businesses, from the ground up is how our economy became the envy of the world. It is the American way. And I wish this president would learn how to be an American.” [Conference call, 7/17/2012]

– Obama is a lazy idiot. Sununu described Obama’s debate performance as “babbling,” “lazy,” and “disengaged,” and dismissed the possibility that he could do better in the future. “When you’re not that bright you can’t get better prepared.” [Fox News, 10/4/2012]

– Obama has no class, just wants to be cool. “That moment of using the B.S. word was kind of a self-defining moment for the president,” he told Sean Hannity. “No class, wants to be cool. Sacrifices the dignity of the presidency for appearing cool to a magazine that works for some of his base.” [Fox News, 10/25/2012]

I believe that this campaign needs to be carefully studied for it's racist subtext. And what's interesting about it is that it's been far more strategic and frankly, obvious, than it was in the last campaign. If I had to guess, it's because of the two candidates' different principles on this issue. Say what you will about John McCain, but he resisted the temptation to pull this lever. (After all it had been played against him in 2000 when the Bush people ran a whisper campaign against him in South Carolina about his "black child.")

Romney, on the other hand, has not flinched when his staunchest surrogates have been out there pushing these racist themes. It says everything about the man.


Update: McCain is still a complete jerk, however:

“Colin Powell, interestingly enough, said that Obama got us out of Iraq,” McCain told the National Review. “But it was Colin Powell, with his testimony before the U.N. Security Council, that got us into Iraq.”

Well, that was certainly a part of the reason. But I'd have to say that the Maverick made quite a contribution too:

During the run-up to the war, McCain argued vociferously in favor of an invasion, quoting the logic of Vice President Dick Cheney. “As Vice President Cheney has said of those who argue that containment and deterrence are working, the argument comes down to this: Yes, Saddam is as dangerous as we say he is,” McCain said in a saber-rattling speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Feb. 13, 2003. “We just need to let him get stronger before we do anything about it,” he added sarcastically.

In the period leading up to the war, McCain sounded, at times, less like a straight-talking maverick and more like the neoconservative former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. “It’s going to send the message throughout the Middle East that democracy can take hold in the Middle East,” McCain said about the war on Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” on Feb. 21, 2003. He seemed to think Iraq would be a cakewalk, predicting that the war “will be brief.”

He also sounded like Wolfowitz’s boss, Donald Rumsfeld, as far back as late 2002. Despite all his talk now about more troops, as the war drums built toward a crescendo, McCain argued that better technology meant fewer troops were going to be needed in Iraq. “Our technology, particularly air-to-ground technology, is vastly improved,” McCain told CNN’s Larry King on Dec. 9, 2002. “I don’t think you’re going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw, nor the length of the buildup, obviously, that we had back in 1991.” It was pure Rumsfeld.

But even back then, not everyone was so sure that the war would be brief or that Rumsfeld’s smaller force would be sufficient. On Feb. 25, 2003, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki famously warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that “several hundred thousand” soldiers would be needed to take and hold Iraq. Rumsfeld publicly disagreed with Shinseki’s estimate.

If McCain shared Shinseki’s position, he didn’t say so at the time. “I have no qualms about our strategic plans,” he told the Hartford Courant in a March 5 article, just before the invasion. “I thought we were very successful in Afghanistan.”

And while he was quiet about Shinseki, McCain shouted down some naysayers who proved to be much more prescient than he. On the cusp of the invasion, West Virginia Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd took to the Senate floor on March 19, 2003, to denounce the war. It was a speech that predicted the future debacle so accurately that it now seems that the senior senator from West Virginia had a crystal ball in his Senate desk. “We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many,” Byrd warned. “After the war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America’s image around the globe.”

McCain pounced, taking to the Senate floor to predict that “when the people of Iraq are liberated, we will again have written another chapter in the glorious history of the United States of America.”

Like I said, jerk.

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digby 10/26/2012 10:30:00 AM