the pageant factor & the interloper attack

2 unrelated thoughts:

1) An acquaintance of mine who has been involved in the pageant culture and used to compete herself made an interesting point regarding Sarah Palin's often-mocked promise to "get back to" Katie Couric on any examples of John McCain being a regulator. She said that pageant contestants are commonly told, if they don't know the answer to a question during the Q&A portion, to say "I'll get back to you on that." She said the theory is that it gets the contestant out of the immediate bind she's in and allows for some levity if said in a charming manner.

Now obviously, someone running for Vice President can't get away with that kind of answer when being asked about issues of national importance that SHE, unlike a pageant contestant, might actually have influence on. But one wonders: Did Palin, in a moment of deep discomfort and uncertainty, simply revert back to her beauty pageant training? If so, that's not stress management we can believe in.

2) In light of the apparent strong and consistent trend toward Obama in most recent state and national polls, I'm hearing from pundits all over the news today that McCain is in real danger of having these numbers solidify UNLESS he comes up with a game changer. They say he needs to hit Obama with an onslaught of negative stuff, now.

Some say to invoke Reverend Wright. Others suggest reviving William Ayers. I think the campaign's recent track record indicates pretty definitively that they don't need plummeting poll numbers as an excuse to make rash, objectionable decisions. But it might be interesting to brainstorm exactly what form the next round of inevitable Obama-bashing will take.

My prediction? They'll hit hard on the idea that Obama is an internationalist, one-worlder type. You know, the kind of UN-loving, culturally "complicated" fellow who puts global interests before America's. On the surface, that may not sound any more objectionable than the stuff they've already been doing. But it's just a short hop from "internationalist" to "other" to "interloper" to "uppity black Muslim." I think that if the McCain campaign hits the first two labels really hard, it'll signal their surrogates to go even further with latter two.

That's really what I think it's come down to at this point- an imminent not-so-subtle full court press playing into latent racial and religious discomfort among many lower-middle-class upper Midwesterners of a certain age.

I think the last two weeks of this campaign are going to include ads that show endless images of Obama alongside vulnerable white women and children. That is, when his face isn't being dissolved into images of Islamic militants and gang members. I think it's coming. Soon. And I fear, despite the current polling trend, that it just might work.