It's apparently the GOP who release this commercial and not the McCain campaign. So this piece of art comes from the people that brought you:
There has been a lot of talk about identity politics this election cycle. Is Barack Obama the black candidate? Is Hillary Clinton the female candidate? Will Latino voters go for Democrats or Republicans? Is the Democratic nomination about wine drinkers versus beer drinkers? Is (as David Brooks loves to say) demography destiny? Of course, although there is some value to asking these questions, the media obsession with it reduces the possibility that the election conversation will be about things that really matter such as...oh, I don't know...issues. Whether people are going to be able to keep their homes during the mortage crisis or their jobs during the recession. Whether we will be able to stop global warming before it becomes irreversable. Whether we will finally have a foreign policy that reduces the number of enemies rather than increasing them. Whether all Americans will finally get the affordable healthcare and quality education that they deserve. Stuff like that.
Identity politics are always symptoms of a pathology. They are signs that something is wrong with our political system, either because people feel so cut off from the posibility of progress through participation in the political process that they are forced into a defensive crouch or because they have become so emotionally overinvolved with a set of policy positions that those positions begin to define who they are in some fundamental ways.
The Republicans have an identity politics problem of the latter kind. A real serious problem. And nobody is talking about it.
