Hatred

Between McCain's adds which basically call Obama a terrorist and a dishonerable person who hates our troops, to Sarah Palin's fear-mongering and demagoguery, this whole presidential race has gotten very ugly. Misfortunately ugly.

For a lot of years I really liked John McCain. I liked how he was centrist, how he avoided some of the most hard-line stances taken by his party. I liked how his public persona was that of a person who truely put America first, before his own party and before politics. You really got the impression that he cared about the country in a way most other career politicians did.

Now, we're several months into a presidential candidacy that people are calling "bizarre" at best. His off-the-cuff style, which is endearing to some, seems so off-putting in the face of global economic disasters. His advertisements, which started off extoling the virtues that he and Sarah Palin had, have turned so amazingly negative, while Obama's advertisements seem (at least on the channels I watch) to be significantly more positive and more focused on issues.

Sarah Palin spends more then half of a political rally explaining in detail how Obama is connected with "terrorists", and can't seem to put out any specific details about our ailing economy. She doesn't even hardly pause when people in the crowd yell things like "Traitor" and "Terrorist" and "Off with his head!".

I really thought that McCain cared about this country, I thought he was an idealistic American who truely wanted to do good things for the country he loves. But as this campaign gets more negative, as people invoke more racism, and as tempers start getting hotter among the latently racist elements, I can't help but feel that McCain and Palin are doing a great disservice to this country.

They're behind in the polls, and they're despirately grasping at anything they can use to change their fortunes. Losing the presidency again might be pretty disappointing to McCain, but taking the whole country down in flames with him is so much worse.