Fright Night

Are you ready to watch election returns on the cold, dark night of November 4th? Have you installed deadbolts on your doors? Loaded up on ammo? Put your therapist’s emergency number on speed-dial?

Good. Because according to MSNBC political columnist John Dickerson, John McCain has a message for you:

Boo!

Dickerson disagrees with those who complain that McCain doesn’t have a consistent message. It’s, “Be afraid, be very afraid!”

McCain is making a last-ditch effort to scare voters with his Obama Horror Show in three acts: “If Obama is elected, your taxes will go up… you'll be unsafe from foreign threats… and, especially if Congress goes Democratic, you will be forced to endure an era of unchecked liberalism.”

I have said before that an Obama victory would be a defeat of fear. In the wind-up days of this election, McCain is handily proving my point.

At his rally in a high-school gymnasium in Dayton, McCain went oogy-boogy over a 2001 interview in which (so the McCain campaign says) Obama claimed one of the tragedies of the civil rights era was that it failed to redistribute wealth. "That is what change means for Barack the Redistributor," McCain told a crowd of about 2,000, which didn't fill the gym. "It means taking your money and giving it to someone else."

One reason McCain’s claim rings sleepy-hollow is that, when read in context, Obama's remarks are neither scary nor subversive. When he talks about redistribution in this speech, he is not talking about taxing the rich to give handouts—as McCain would scare us into believing. Obama is primarily referencing the Supreme Court's reluctance to force school districts to spend money to provide equality in SCHOOLS. Later in the same interview, when Obama again discusses redistribution, his larger point is about the complexities of school funding after Brown v. Board of Education.

As for, "taking your money and giving it to someone else," it is McCain’s plan, not Obama’s, that provides for this this. To mention only one example, Obama’s tax plan reduces taxes for working individuals who already pay taxes, while McCain’s $5,000 health benefit is distributed to everyone, taxpayer or not. (It’s amazing what you can learn when you awake at 4:00 am to watch Joe Scarsborough’s Right-leaning morning talk shoe, “Morning Joe.”)

The real irony, though, is that the working middle class has already suffered from an eight-year greedfest of wealth redistribution, as it watched its hard-earned tax dollars disappear into the black hole of tax cuts for the uber wealthy. The ranks of the middle class have declined as a result, leading many to fear a genuine, not rally-speak threat: that we are moving toward a two-class nation of haves and have-nots, without the middle class cushion by which America has defined itself and achieved greatness.

If McCain really wants to scare us though, he’s missing the most obvious of all horror shows: the one on Wall Street. Or is it the one in the housing market? No, wait, it’s the swelling BLOB of unemployment… Watch out! It’s swallowing our kids’ educations, our retirements, even the artificial cheese we use to make our Walmart macaroni edible!

Conservatives also sneer that Obama’s lead is a result of the disproportionate amount of campaign funds at his disposal, and have repeatedly implied that the funding sources are suspect. Who do they think gave Obama his financial advantage? We did. That’s right… not unknown secret Commie pinko terrorist Muslim Planet 9 contributors… but Obama supporters who, though just as hard-hit by the economic meltdown as everyone else, are willing to donate $50 whenever they can to usher in change.

I’m ready for November 4th. And the only thing that scares me is that McCain might yet fear-monger his way into the White House.