Whisper
October 22nd, 2008, 04:21 PM
After a seven-month post-NAFTAgate lull, Canada was back on the American electoral radar this week, if only as a blip, a rhetorical pawn in the increasingly loopy discourse about possible anti- and un-American activities afoot in the homeland.
By the end of a two-week cycle in which efforts to portray the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States as a sleeper agent or terrorist failed to pay off in the polls, his opponents hit on a new tack: Anti-Americanism.
On MSNBC's Hardball Monday night, host Chris Matthews said in response to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's wild-eyed rant on his show Friday about Barack Obama's vague and unsubstantiated un-American activities, "What if a candidate for higher office in Canada was accused of anti-Canadianism? Would we think it was absurd?"
The line is funny for an American audience because they have no idea what Canadianism, much less anti-Canadianism, might look like (I'm not sure we do, either, but that's a whole other column), which makes anti-Canadianism, as a political smear, brilliant in its sinister irrefutability.
Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, had said she thought Obama "may have anti-American views," adding, "I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out are they pro-America or anti-America."
In the 48 hours following her comments, her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, raised $640,000.
In the absence of anti-Canadianism here, we use pro-Americanism as a political bogeyman, which is much more evocative and, in Canadian political shorthand, conjures unilatereralism, line dancing, Dick Cheney and, maybe from now on, Bachmann.
The McCain campaign seems to be flirting with pro-Canadianism as a smear, dissing what many Americans think of as Canadian notions such as government-run health care and accusing Obama of peddling, as John McCain said, "a word most Americans hold in disrepute:" Socialism.
When we think "socialist" we think Tommy Douglas or Ed Broadbent. When Americans think socialist, they picture grainy Soviet motivational Movietones of workers doing jumping jacks in government-issue underpants.
In G-7 countries where heads of government have actually been elected as unabashed socialists and to the many Americans weary of the culture wars, McCain and Bachmann must sound like Joe McCarthy hectoring a House Un-American Activities Committee witness.
Obama is being accused of socialism by both McCain and Sarah Palin, not for nationalizing the banks (George W. Bush just did that, which may explain the diversionary strategy behind all of this) but for suggesting to Joe the Plumber, who is not a real plumber but a sort of an amateur plumber, that he'd like to "spread the wealth."
It may be that, after all the shocking disqualifiers the Republicans have unearthed about Obama -- his middle name, his refusal to refuse to be in the same room with a '70s crackpot-turned-academic -- they may have finally found one that'll stick.
If the only people who buy into the red scare are the same ones who believed "celebrity," "elitist" and "terrorist," then "crazy" might just have legs.
Because in America, saying you want to "spread the wealth" is like saying you want to drown all the kittens only much, much worse because kittens aren't legal tender.
The fact that Obama would utter "spread the wealth" in broad daylight on a Toledo street to a 250-lb. rogue plumber may just disqualify him for exhibiting precisely the sort of recklessness America can't afford to risk in a commander-in-chief.
By the end of a two-week cycle in which efforts to portray the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States as a sleeper agent or terrorist failed to pay off in the polls, his opponents hit on a new tack: Anti-Americanism.
On MSNBC's Hardball Monday night, host Chris Matthews said in response to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's wild-eyed rant on his show Friday about Barack Obama's vague and unsubstantiated un-American activities, "What if a candidate for higher office in Canada was accused of anti-Canadianism? Would we think it was absurd?"
The line is funny for an American audience because they have no idea what Canadianism, much less anti-Canadianism, might look like (I'm not sure we do, either, but that's a whole other column), which makes anti-Canadianism, as a political smear, brilliant in its sinister irrefutability.
Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, had said she thought Obama "may have anti-American views," adding, "I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out are they pro-America or anti-America."
In the 48 hours following her comments, her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, raised $640,000.
In the absence of anti-Canadianism here, we use pro-Americanism as a political bogeyman, which is much more evocative and, in Canadian political shorthand, conjures unilatereralism, line dancing, Dick Cheney and, maybe from now on, Bachmann.
The McCain campaign seems to be flirting with pro-Canadianism as a smear, dissing what many Americans think of as Canadian notions such as government-run health care and accusing Obama of peddling, as John McCain said, "a word most Americans hold in disrepute:" Socialism.
When we think "socialist" we think Tommy Douglas or Ed Broadbent. When Americans think socialist, they picture grainy Soviet motivational Movietones of workers doing jumping jacks in government-issue underpants.
In G-7 countries where heads of government have actually been elected as unabashed socialists and to the many Americans weary of the culture wars, McCain and Bachmann must sound like Joe McCarthy hectoring a House Un-American Activities Committee witness.
Obama is being accused of socialism by both McCain and Sarah Palin, not for nationalizing the banks (George W. Bush just did that, which may explain the diversionary strategy behind all of this) but for suggesting to Joe the Plumber, who is not a real plumber but a sort of an amateur plumber, that he'd like to "spread the wealth."
It may be that, after all the shocking disqualifiers the Republicans have unearthed about Obama -- his middle name, his refusal to refuse to be in the same room with a '70s crackpot-turned-academic -- they may have finally found one that'll stick.
If the only people who buy into the red scare are the same ones who believed "celebrity," "elitist" and "terrorist," then "crazy" might just have legs.
Because in America, saying you want to "spread the wealth" is like saying you want to drown all the kittens only much, much worse because kittens aren't legal tender.
The fact that Obama would utter "spread the wealth" in broad daylight on a Toledo street to a 250-lb. rogue plumber may just disqualify him for exhibiting precisely the sort of recklessness America can't afford to risk in a commander-in-chief.