Is this the best we can do?

-- Tim BrintonWe learned on Oct. 1 in a CNN report that yes, Sarah Palin can see Russia from Alaska. But only from a tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea, where 100 native Alaskans live in squalor and dump their garbage in the sea. Gov. Palin has never been there, and some inhabitants have no idea who she is.

It was a light piece, chiding Ms. Palin’s exaggeration of her foreign policy experience. Ten days later the tone of the campaign changed radically. As the world economy plunged, Barack Obama’s measured response, compared to John McCain’s erratic behavior, moved Mr. Obama ahead in the polls, and the McCain-Palin response cast Ms. Palin as no longer the pit bull but the rattlesnake. Now the campaign runs on venom.

Ms. Palin accused Mr. Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” as if he were sipping sherry in Osama bin Laden’s cave. She cited The New York Times, leaving out the Times’ conclusion that Mr. Obama’s fleeting association with former Weatherman William Ayers was not a valid issue. Mr. McCain, having stirred up the fury of his crowds, was forced to witness the results of his demagoguery. When one woman called Mr. Obama an “Arab,” and a man said he didn’t want to raise his son in an Obama-led America, Mr. McCain pulled back. He called Mr. Obama a “decent man,” only to be booed himself.

Three problems remain:

* The Real McCain. Frank Rich wrote in the Aug. 17 New York Times that the uncovered issue was the John McCain we did not know. He had spun a myth about himself as the heroic prisoner of war, as if to question the legend was to betray our country. But his fellow prisoner, Philip Butler, and several generals interviewed for Salon.com testified that POW experience does not prepare one for the presidency and that Mr. McCain is an explosive hothead whose finger does not belong near the red button. Google “McCain’s temper YouTube” for a lineup of videos of him blowing his top.

Several journalists, including James Carroll in The Boston Globe and Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, have dug deeper. Mr. McCain still sees Vietnam as a good cause we should have won; he has emotionally transferred that judgment to Iraq. When Mr. Obama told him in the first debate that Iraq was wrong from the start, he had no answer -- only that that was not a question the next president would deal with. His responses to Iraq, Iran and Georgia are those of an angry man programmed for war.

His recent impulsiveness indicates that he lacks the temperament to lead. He canceled his campaign to rush to Washington to “lead” the economic discussions, but he canceled only his appearance on the David Letterman show. His testy interview with the editors of The Des Moines Register broadcast on MSNBC, his refusal to even look at Mr. Obama during the first debate and his calling Mr. Obama “that one” during the second reveal an odd duck.

The “Saturday Night Live” satire of the second debate has Mr. McCain wandering aimlessly around the set, intruding between Mr. Obama and the camera. On Oct. 9, Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan compared watching Mr. McCain to watching a parent grow old. His smile is weird, his jokes fall flat. In the Sept. 29 issue of The Nation, JoAnn Wypijewski suggested that just as Mr. McCain dumped his first wife for Cindy, with Ms. Palin as “his third wife,” he is “deploying sex as a central political weapon to recharge his potency.”

* The Palin Problem. Her mockery of community organizers and Democrats against torture was dirty pool, but the ridicule of the environmental study of grizzly bears in Montana, repeated by Mr. McCain, was bizarre. Only National Public Radio explained it. The National Park survey on the grizzly bear population, now at 765, is to protect them from extinction. Ms. Palin opposes protecting polar bears as well. Where does this stop? she asks. Keep this up and she won’t be allowed to shoot a moose or pick off wolves from a helicopter.

Since her nomination, the Republican campaign has kept Ms. Palin in what The Boston Globe compares to a witness protection program lest anyone other than handpicked anchors ask her questions. Step by step her Alaskan record is catching up with her. Her flirtation with the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, which her husband joined, is yet to be explained. The state legislature report concluded that she “abused her power” in her efforts to get her former brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper.

* The Elephant in the Room is Black. A friend asked me recently whether an “October surprise” was in the works. Why, prior to the economic crisis, were the polls so close? In a New York Times-CBS poll, 19 percent responded that those they know would not vote for a black person. The real message in the commercial that juxtaposed Mr. Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton was not that they were all celebrities, but it was to play on white folks’ fear of black-white sex.

Andrew Hacker in the Sept. 25 New York Review of Books examines state laws and Supreme Court decisions that make it more difficult for black people to vote. They make voters produce a passport or driver’s license, which many blacks don’t have. In many states, former prisoners, who number over 2 million, cannot vote. In states that require electronic registration lists, blacks who have moved frequently will be left out -- which is what the lawmakers intended. Last week at two McCain rallies, speakers referred to Mr. Obama as Barack Hussein, and Frank Keating called him “a man of the street.” Those who create the anti-Obama commercials may have a last-minute race card up their sleeve.

Mr. Obama said at the convention in Denver that “We are a better country than this.” The Oct. 13 New Yorker endorsement concludes: “The election of Obama ... would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home.” These are some of the reasons I wrote in my Newark Star Ledger (NJVoices.com) online commentary that this priest will vote for Barack Obama.

Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is living this year at Boston College writing a biography of Jesuit Fr. Robert F. Drinan. Fr. Schroth’s e-mail address is raymondschroth@aol.com.

National Catholic Reporter October 31, 2008