Sarah Palin said last week that "[Barack Obama] is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country." The McCain campaign is running 100% negative ads. Palin's rhetoric foreshadows a barrage of propaganda that will attempt to cast Obama as an unamerican, unpatriotic other. 

When Palin gets cocky, her dog whistle drops a couple octaves, going from ultrasonic to merely shrill. Now, even the AP can hear the racial undertones:

And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that McCain himself may come to regret. [AP]

Why might McCain regret letting Palin give voice to the racial resentments and fears that have been driving Republicans to the polls for decades? 

Because there's a big strategic difference between racist attacks that everyone quietly agrees to pretend are not racist and racist attacks that are called out as such. These days, even Republicans aren't proud of being racist. They certainly don't like to think of their candidate as racist.

So, Republican strategists have to subtly push racial buttons without overtly saying anything unequivocally bigoted. So, we get memes like "celebrity" and "empty suit" and "sex ed for 5-year-olds"--they're just close enough to "minstrel" and "affirmative action hire" and "sex predator" to give racists a pleasing sense of "otherness" about Obama without forcing them to identify what that feeling is based on. The latest McCain ad hits pushes the "angry black man" and the "liberal coward" button, calling Obama "dangerous" and "dishonorable" for allegedly saying that troops in Afghanistan were bombing villages and killing civilians.

If the AP is willing to broach the racism issue, the gig could be up.  The political cost of being recognized as racist is huge. Let's keep on this and make John McCain and his mini-Rove Steve Schmidt pay in full.