Is America Ready to Be Skunked?

This morning was an extremely bad morning at the Caric household. We got skunked. While following my wife to the car at 5:30am, our blue heeler mix made a quick move and got a skunk in its mouth. Now we're all paying the price. The smell is awful and it permeates the whole yard and house. My wife had to drive to Lexington to take an exam for her master's program. Good luck to the students sitting next to her. I'm not any better. I'll be taking my second shower after I give the poor dog another peroxide bath.

She might be getting three altogether.

But that's okay because it looks like the Caric family is going to be a symbol for the whole country--even Alaska. That's because the whole country is going to be skunked during the last month of the presidential campaign.

The McCain campaign started skunking up the political scene by sending out Sarah Palin to talk about how Barack Obama has been "palling around with terrorists." The terrorist reference is to William Ayres, the ex-Weatherman and current education professor who served as co-chair with Obama on an education project and hosted an Obama event in the nineties. According to the NY Times, Obama was never close to Ayres but Palin made it sound like they were buddies. Assuming her full attack dog demeanor, Palin added this little nugget that the Associated Press called "racially tinged."

"This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America," she said. "We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism."

It's a classic Republican race-baiting manuever. Palin is directly but vaguely claiming that Obama sees the world differently from other Americans. But she's indirectly alluding to the idea that Obama is different from other Americans and that he's different because he's black. The beauty of this kind of rhetorical manuever is that Palin can make a reference that's well-known to be racial but also plausibly deny that her remarks have a racial connotation.

Of course, attacking Obama's association with William Ayres is just the warm-up act for all the nastiness about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that the McCain camp will be delivering sooner or later.

But the Obama camp is going to do some skunking of its own. As soon as Palin made her William Ayres comments, the Obama campaign got to work on an ad linking McCain to the Keating Five scandal of the 1980's. Material on McCain's links to Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy and radical right, racist organizations is on the horizon as are questions about Sarah Palin's involvement with an Alaska separatist party.

McCain's trying to bounce back in the polls by dishing the dirt and Obama isn't going to take it lying down.

We're all about to be skunked.

And I don't think a peroxide bath is going to get rid of the smell.

Well, time to check on my dog.