Is McCain too angry? I don’t think so. If anything, the issue is more about what makes him angry and the degree to which he is able to channel that emotion into productive, thoughtful, and level-headed action. Anger can be a righteous ally, but it gets destructive whenever it’s allowed to make sound, reasoned judgment bow to its volatile mandates.
To his detractors, Obama isn’t angry enough. But that doesn’t seem right, either. He is just a lot better at demonstrating/performing self-control — with the smile that is supposed to show just how much he won’t let anything get under his skin.
Whatever the candidates themselves represent on this score, their most adamant supporters are definitely angry. No doubt about it. But where is that anger focused?
One of the problems is that we usually tend to translate our anger — come election time — into unfair demonizations of the other side’s candidate. That’s part of what happened to Hillary Clinton during the primaries. Excitement for Obama led some supporters to justify their positions by making Hillary out to be the worst person in the world, the personification of evil itself. And Clinton’s most strident backers reciprocated vis-a-vis Obama.
In many ways, that was part of the point that John Lewis was trying to make about these recent McCain-Palin rallies. You misunderstand his critique if you think he was disparaging the crowds. Crowds are crowds. Sometimes I fear that they are always just one well-tossed rock away from a mob, but Republicans don’t corner the market on that potentiality. Lewis was criticizing the campaign, not its supporters. The candidates set the tone, and Lewis was angry because he felt that McCain and Palin were fomenting a form of anti-Obama rage that used his middle name (and the invocations of Bill Ayers) as an excuse for leveling all of their anger at Obama himself.
Part of what happens, then, is that you overstate the supposed line between “us” and “them.” “Our America” becomes constituted by a starkly drawn intranational fault line. It isn’t inclusive of “them,” even if they might technically be citizens. Does our political culture have to function this way? I don’t know, but it is definitely one of the things that makes me angry. You don’t have to hate McCain to back Obama. And it is horribly self-destructive to predicate your support of McCain on an assumption that Obama is some kind of passive supporter of terrorism.
