Bloggerinterrupted has a very good video up on YouTube with like a million skajillion views. He documents the results of the McCain-Palin campaign’s rather effective effort to brand Barack Obama as “The Other.” I’m sure people can disagree about whether there’s overt or even implicit racism and xenophobia in it, but an excellent point was raised on last week’s On the Media: McCain and especially Palin keep asking, “Who is Barack Obama?” They are painting him as risky by acting like he’s this big question mark, he’s The Unknown. Nevermind the one doing the asking was practically nobody in August. Huh.

This is coming from the same campaign that in another breath will accuse him of basically running for president since 2004, when he gave the speech at the DNC that made us all sit up and take notice. He’s officially been running for president for over a year and a half and probably hasn’t ever been more than 30 feet from a camera or a microphone since then. And yet he is more “unknown” than some backwater “Hockey Mom” that 98% of the country had never heard of two months ago, and who has spent half her time on the ticket in hiding from the big bad mainstream media (and the other half spewing talking points). She gets a free pass to One of Us Village, while that scary Other guy is still too risky and unknown.

Disheartening, to say the least.



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