“Who is Barack Obama?” John McCain is asking us. This should prompt an obvious response: “Who is John McCain?” But we need not ask, because we have seen John McCain, or at least his type, half a century ago. His type had a different name, and trafficked in a different sort of guilt-by-association, but it was a senator whose tactics were the same. The insinuations were the same. Whether the result will be the same remains to be seen.
That long-ago senator embraced the politics of fear as no one had before. He exploited the fears of a paranoid populace. He acquired notoriety and masterminded a brand of smear tactics that became synonymous with his surname, and it was dubbed “McCarthyism.”
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