before a working-class crowd in Bethlehem, Pa., a few days later when a man in the audience shouted out, “You’re a hottie!” Onstage, John McCain laughed, and Cindy laughed louder. Not missing a beat, Palin flashed a killer smile and asked, “Now, what does that have to do with anything?”
But in other ways she was a little too hot. At the Clearwater rally, someone in the crowd used a racial epithet about a black sound man for NBC, and someone else reportedly yelled “Kill him!” in an ambiguous reference to either Ayers or Obama. By the end of the week, YouTube was showing film clips of Palin crowds shouting “Treason!”, “Off with his head!” and “He is a bomb!” At a McCain-Palin rally in Strongsville, Ohio, a man called Obama a “one-man terror cell,” and in one unsettling film clip a voter’s young daughter exclaims about Obama, “You need gloves to touch him!”
Palin, the polls showed, had succeeded in rallying the Republican base. But she, or the simmering anger around her, helped make Obama supporters out of countless independent voters.
On the weekend between the second and third debates, Congressman John Lewis—a civil-rights hero who had been beaten while staging nonviolent protests during the 1960s—issued a press release accusing McCain and Palin of “playing with fire” and seeming to compare McCain to former Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist infamous for stirring racial fears. McCain was stunned. He had devoted a chapter to Lewis in one of his books, “Why Courage Matters.” He so admired Lewis that he had taken his children to meet him.
McCain was on his bus, about to board a plane in Moline, Ill., when he read the remarks on an aide’s BlackBerry. He was so dumbfounded that he held the plane on the tarmac while he considered how to respond. Salter, who had penned the chapter on Lewis, urged McCain to remain more dignified than Lewis had been in his remarks. But Schmidt called in from headquarters brimming with outrage. “Sir,” said Schmidt, “he called you a racist. It must be responded to.” Nicolle Wallace agreed. Salter was not so sure. He was “very pained” over the incident, Schmidt later recalled about Salter, but his instinct told him not to get his boss into a name-calling fight with a martyr of the civil-rights movement. McCain decided to go with Schmidt and put out a strong statement calling on Obama to “immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments.” (Obama left it to a spokesman to blandly state, “Senator Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies.”)
According to several aides, McCain had trouble shaking his sadness over Lewis’s statement. To the reporters traveling with McCain, the candidate seemed uncertain, as if he was not quite sure what he had gotten himself into. In an effort to raise doubts about Obama, McCain had given a stump speech in which he asked the audience, “Who is Barack Obama?” At an earlier rally in Albuquerque a man shouted, “A terrorist!” McCain paused, taken aback. He looked surprised, troubled. But he continued with the speech. (Salter later said McCain wasn’t sure that he had heard correctly.)
A couple of days later, at a rally in Lakeville, Minn., he seemed to find his bearings. “If you want a fight, we will fight,” he said. “But we will be respectful. I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments. I will respect him, and I want—no, no,” McCain said to loud boos. “I want everyone to be respectful.” In the question-and-answer period, a middle-aged woman in a bright red shirt took the mike and said, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, he’s not, he’s a, um—he’s an Arab.”
“No. No, ma’am. No, ma’am. No, ma’am. No, ma’am,” McCain said, taking back the wireless mike. “He’s a decent family man, a citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues; that’s what this campaign is about. He’s not. Thank you.”
On Oct. 12, the Sunday night before the last debate, McCain’s core group of advisers—Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, adman Fred Davis, strategist Greg Strimple, pollster Bill McInturff and strategy director Sarah Simmons—met to review the state of the campaign. The polling numbers were grim. The question on the table was whether it was time to call on McCain and tell him it was over, that he no longer had a chance to win. The consensus in the room was no, not yet, not while he still had a “pulse.” The pulse was faint, one of the strategists said afterward, and getting fainter—McCain had no better than a 10 or 15 percent shot at the presidency. The group knew he would have to have a very strong last debate to improve the odds even a little.
There was grumbling that Palin had jumped the gun by bringing up Ayers at her rallies before the campaign could properly do the groundwork with a rollout strategy and ads. (At one rally, she had talked about Obama “palling around with terrorists.”) Palin was mad at her handlers. Reportedly, she felt that Wallace and Schmidt had poorly coached and advised her. One adviser later speculated that she impulsively talked about Ayers because she felt thwarted—she had really wanted to bring up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Actually, Palin was feeling hurt and angry over the tabloid treatment of her 17-year-old daughter Bristol, and decided—on her own—that Ayers should be fair game. McCain’s advisers were working on a strategy that would launch an Ayers attack the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and Salter was resisting.)
The campaign’s internal polls showed that those lower-income swing voters in industrial states had not forgotten about Wright. In the view of some of his advisers, McCain had a chance to really hurt Obama by dredging up those videotapes of his longtime pastor crying “Goddam America!” But McCain did not want to. He did not want to do anything that smacked of racism. Some of his aides had quietly wished that the 527s, the independent- expenditure groups, would do the campaign’s dirty work by running ads about Wright. Yet others worried that the 527s would indeed run lurid ads about Wright—and that McCain would get the blame. In any case, the big conservative moneymen who might fund such a smear campaign were lying low, and not just because their portfolios were suffering in the stock-market dive. They didn’t want to be called racist, either. […continued on page 6]