Just before Barack Obama first won the presidency, I was covering John McCain’s rallies in Kentucky. The people I met there convinced me that McCain might win, that this was no done deal. I was working with a writer who happened to be black – David Matthews – and at one rally we were pulled aside by a tall scary blonde man who seemed to have come straight from The Lodge in Twin Peaks. Did we want to meet the senator? Did we want to get up close and personal? We found ourselves seated very near McCain among the few Latino and black people who were also at the rally, so that the cameras could home in on what looked like “diverse” support.
The crowd was largely white, of course, and it was the mention of Sarah Palin that really got them excited: “Drill, baby, drill,” they kept screaming. Palin, McCain’s running mate, had no time for environmental concerns and had promised offshore drilling for oil.
McCain said later that he regretted appointing her instead of Joe Lieberman; in his final years, he took on Donald Trump and said he felt responsible for the parlous state of public discourse. His support for arming the Saudis and the bombing of Gaza – but his recognition too that Syria was being destroyed – leave a complex legacy to say the least.
Yet, in the unleashing of Palin, a person proudly ignorant, who didn’t even know what she didn’t know, something in the American psyche was tapped into. Something primal. Politics began to detoriate. Remember those pictures of Palin with the blood of a bear she had killed literally on her hands? Pioneer woman. Ignoramus. Populist. The non-expert who represented ordinary people, who preached a kind of anti-intellectualism and ultimately a far-right anti-politics. It was all there in 2008. So McCain may have been personally decent, heroic, self-reflective and complex. But it was obvious even back then that many of his supporters were after something altogether different.
