McCain in That 2008 Moment

So John McCain died yesterday, and many people are discussing his life and career, the good and the bad.

I have been most drawn to writing about that moment during the 2008 campaign when he defended Obama to a racist woman at an open forum. Defend he did, but the way he did it didn't sit right, either. This set of tweets sums it up:


I agree with Sam Husseini in this exchange, but I also have some empathy for how hard it is for anyone to contest the underlying assumptions of a person in a single sentence during an exchange like this.

Another Twitter user, Jonathan Katz, posted a thread that gets at this on a deeper level:

That time when McCain confronted the woman who said she couldn't trust Obama because he's an "Arab" may be the most tellingly fucked up moment in American politics in the last 20 years.

If you look back, McCain was in a town hall that apparently had a number of racist white people who kept saying that they were scared of Obama taking power. He clearly was struggling to convince them to vote for him by choice, not out of fear of a black president.

A lot of people have focused on the fact that McCain responded to the woman's statement that Obama was "an Arab" by saying "No ma'am, he's a decent family man, citizen" as evidence of McCain's racism or Islamophobia. But I think it's actually both better and worse than that.

What the woman actually said was: “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not? Um. He’s an Arab. He's not--”

Like most of us when we speak casually, she was speaking disjointedly and relying on implication. She was also imprecise about her racist conspiracy theory.

The word she kept skipping over after "he's not" was probably either "an American" or "a citizen." The idea is that being a Muslim of color ("Arab," to her) precludes being an American. This was batshit for two reasons: It's nativist bullshit. And of course, Obama isn't Muslim!

The thing that I think is better than some people give it credit for is that McCain answered more what she meant than what she said. Her point was that Obama isn't "one of us" and that he's bad. And he's basically just saying, no, that's not true.

Even Vox got this wrong in trying to remember him [McCain] tonight. They transcribed his quote as saying "he's not [an Arab]." But he didn't say that. He responded to "he's not" with "he's not." As in, "he's not whatever bad thing you think he is."

The thing that was tellingly WORSE than people gave it credit for, I think, is that it revealed how deeply embedded in American thinking that woman's racism was. Even people who disagreed with her -- even McCain -- knew EXACTLY what she meant.

And this connects directly to the rise of Trump. Our national conversation depends on an agreed upon set of facts and assumptions. And that moment, and the applause it still gets, reveal the extent to which even the nonbigots are still relying on extremely bigoted assumptions.

When people who hate Trump, who deplore the Nazis, who care about truth, etc, etc, still tacitly assume with their profiles and arguments that white heartland voters are the "real Americans," that brown people essentially don't belong, that black people are essentially dangerous and on and on, they are ultimately ceding the argument to people like the woman in red.

And that really is what McCain did in that moment. He said she was wrong on the facts, but didn't challenge her assumptions. And that's a big part of how we got where we are today.

Challenging the underlying assumptions (assuming you're aware of them!) is really hard, especially in the moment of conversation. Even harder if you're holding a microphone in front of an audience, as you have been for days during a campaign. I know I would suck at it.

So I cut McCain some slack in this instance, but still see it as Katz has said: a symptom of a much bigger structural problem in our country.