McCain’s silence lends weight to race-baiting

John McCain thinks he’s caught in an unfair bind because his opponent is a black man.

If Obama were white, McCain would go after him for his longtime association with Jeremiah Wright, the incendiary former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, campaign insiders say. But Obama is black, as is Wright. And McCain believes he’d be tarred and feathered with accusations of racism if he made Wright a centerpiece of his assault on Obama.

So, instead, McCain has exaggerated Obama’s relationship with a white guy named William Ayers, a middle-aged Chicago college professor. When Obama was in elementary school, Ayers founded a radical anti-Vietnam War group, the Weather Underground, which planted bombs in government buildings. Years later, after Ayers was well into a law-abiding life as an education reformer, he and Obama served together on a nonprofit board. So McCain and his vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin, accuse Obama of consorting with “terrorists.”

Though he has largely resisted revisiting the Rev. Wright’s venomous rants, McCain has still been accused of race-baiting. There’s a reason for that. We’ve all seen the frightening news reports of McCain rallies where some of his supporters scream “terrorist” or “kill him” or “off with his head” at the mention of Obama’s name.

There is no evidence to suggest McCain is a racist. (Nor did John Lewis call him one when Lewis called out McCain last weekend for the ugly tone of his campaign.) The racism charge is divisive, destructive and overused. Black activists, politicians and regular folks with a grudge cry “racism” all too often, shutting down civil discussion and, worse, de-valuing the word. As a result, actual acts of racism are less likely to attract the attention they deserve.

But don’t feel too sorry for McCain. Throughout his 26-year political career, the GOP has used a strategy of blatant racial appeals to disaffected white voters, the most infamous of which was the Willie Horton ad that George H.W. Bush used against Michael Dukakis. (Bush 41 is no racist, either, but he was not above using racially charged tactics to help get elected.)

While he revels in the myth that he’s a “maverick,” McCain never publicly objected to those tactics. So he shouldn’t be surprised that he is now associated with them. McCain’s been dirtied by accusations of race-baiting because the Republican Party throws around racially charged innuendo.

Moreover, McCain has not been nearly as careful in this campaign as he should have been, given this country’s violent racial history. While he would no doubt try to portray any Democratic rival as “the other” (or, perhaps, “that one”), it’s more dangerous when the McCain camp goes to extremes to paint Obama as alien, unpatriotic or, as Palin says, someone who is “palling around with terrorists.” Bush allowed surrogates to denigrate John Kerry as effete, elitist and —- most appalling, apparently —- French. But that didn’t whip Bush’s supporters into a threatening frenzy.

McCain knows perfectly well that Obama is more likely to be targeted by a nutty assassin than a white candidate would be. That’s the reason Homeland Security ordered Secret Service protection for Obama in May 2007, the earliest any candidate has been given a security detail. So why would McCain stoke the fires of resentment and risk igniting a homicidal maniac?

That’s why he was criticized by Congressman Lewis, who never said McCain was a segregationist, like Wallace. Lewis did, however, say that the inflammatory rhetoric McCain and, especially, Palin have used reminded him of the “atmosphere of hate” created and exploited by George Wallace. “Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all,” Lewis said in a statement.

Eugene Patterson, a distinguished former editor of The Atlanta Constitution, had something similar to say in a September 1963 column after madmen put a bomb into a Birmingham church and killed four little black girls:

A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her…

We —- who raise no hand to silence the mean and little men who have their nigger jokes.

We —- who stand aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every society slide their leashes from our hand, and spring.

Perhaps McCain should read that column.

> Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.

cynthia@ajc.com