John McCain’s North Carolina Dilemma

John McCain is opposing the state GOP in North Carolina which is running commercials linking Barack Obama with state officials. They are using the association of Barack Obama and his retired pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. They are using the 30 second sound bites everyone has seen 1001 times before.

Senator McCain is opposing this. He doesn’t want to run this kind of campaign and that’s great. He ought to oppose this. If you watch the commercial, it’s a not very thinly veiled use of racism and McCain, frankly, does not want to be associated with this. All of this is good.

But John McCain has another problem. In an ironic twist of fate, the two leading Democratic candidates are more church affiliated people than John McCain is. Both Obama and Clinton are more deeply invested, church wise, than Senator McCain is, and they are both more politically aware of religious leaders, who they are, and what they stand for.

Senator McCain was having a problem with Evangelicals so he courted John Hagee, a mega-church pastor from Texas. The only problem was the Hagee was probably not the best person to chose from. John Hagee is one of the people who proclaimed Katrina to be God’s vengeance on the city of New Orleans. John Hagee is one who aligned the Roman Catholic Church with rampant anti-semitism and has referred to it as the ‘great whore’ in the book of Revelation. Oh yes, and on women: Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick.”

If John McCain’s campaign uses commercials linking Barack Obama to Jeremiah Wright then John McCain runs the risk of commercials being run linking him to John Hagee.

The argument is going to be made that Obama sat in Wright’s church for 20 years. True enough. But, the more people look into Jeremiah Wright, the more substance they are going to find that he is really an incredible individual and more and more people will understand why Obama sat in that church. The more they look into John Hagee they will wonder what John McCain was thinking when he sought this endorsement.

Senator McCain has, to his credit, looked to take the high road here. It demonstrates good character on his part, but also an insight that there are some gutters one does not want to play in. His North Carolina dilemma is real and offers nothing good for anyone.