The McCain Campaign's Susan Smith Moment
Back in 1994, South Carolina mother Susan Smith earned the revulsion of the nation when she blamed a mysterious black assailant for the abduction of her two sons, children she ultimately admitted having murdered herself. With today's revelations that it helped foster a hoax about the supposed assault of one of its volunteers by an African-American backer of Barack Obama, John McCain's presidential campaign has joined Smith as a race-baiting fraud.
The fabricated assault on Ashley Todd, the young white woman helping McCain in Pennsylvania, quickly drew the sympathies of both campaigns. But almost immediately, her suspicious story raised eyebrows even in the conservative blogosphere. By early Friday, Todd was exposed as a fraud. And as Talking Points Memo reported, the McCain campaign in the Keystone State apparently played a vital role in perpetuating it:
John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."
Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.
If this scenario sounds familiar, it should. Exactly 14 years ago, it was Susan Smith who drew Americans' initial sympathy - and subsequent scorn - for her invention of a black bogeyman to conceal her heinous crime.
On October 24th, 1994, as the New York Times recalled, Smith killed her sons, killings for which she was eventually sentenced to life in prison:
That night, investigators say, Mrs. Smith pulled her car to the edge of a deep lake, stepped out, put the gearshift in drive and let it roll down the boat ramp into the black water. Her two little boys, buckled snugly in their safety seats, died under the lake...
..."I believed her, right up to the end," said Juliaette Kerhulas, of Mrs. Smith's story that a young black man had ordered her out of her burgundy 1990 Mazda on the night of Oct. 25, then driven away with 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alexander in the back seat.
Ms. Kerhulas wasn't the only one who believed in her. None other than House Speaker Newt Gingrich rushed to the defense of Smith, whose step-father ironically happened to be a prominent Republican fundraiser and member of the Christian coalition. The case, Gingrich insisted, showed the decay of American society under Democratic Party rule:
Enter Newt Gingrich, who rushed into action on election eve with another reliable generic culprit: society. He said the double murder "vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things," expediently adding that "the only way you get change is to vote Republican."
While American public opinion clearly showed its residual ugly racist history with its unquestioning acceptance of Smith's initial story of a Willie Hortonesque African American assailant, the subsequent realization and broad-based societal outrage indicated both how far we've come and how far we've got to go. Ultimately, justice was done.
Fast forward 14 years to the Todd episode in western Pennsylvania. Will justice be done this time as well?
John Moody, executive vice president at Fox News, thinks so. Early Friday before the revelation of Ashley Todd's sham, Moody concluded:
"If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain's quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting."
That would be a fitting legacy - and justice served - for the scurrilous, gutter dwelling McCain campaign.
Karl Marx famously said that historical events occur twice, first as tragedy and the second time as farce. Of the McCain campaign's Susan Smith moment, truer words were never spoken.
UPDATE: Perpetuating stereotypes and helping perpetrate race-based fraud isn't solely the province of the right. As I've noted before, Al Sharpton's role in the 1989 Tawana Brawley hoax should have long since ended his association the Democratic Party.
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