McCain's racist rhetoric

Yesterday, civil rights leader and Representative John Lewis compared the rhetoric of John McCain to that of segregationist governor George Wallace.

"During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."

Rather than backing off of their hate-filled rhetoric, McCain's campaign shot back on FOX News today, claiming the candidate's imprisonment in a POW camp was somehow comparable to the centuries-long oppression of African Americans.

"He was in a Vietnam prison camp serving his country with his civil rights also denied...Nobody knows sacrifice like John McCain does."

McCain's time in a POW camp may have allowed him to sympathize more deeply with people who suffer at the hands of their captors, but the connection to fighting for the civil rights of others seems to have been lost on him.

When it came time to protect the employment rights of racial minorities and women in 1989, McCain voted to back George H.W. Bush's veto of a bill that would have overturned a Supreme Court decision to roll back civil rights nearly twenty years. As Sam Stein reported at huffpo in April,

The act was a response to a series of controversial Supreme Court decisions made the year before. In those decisions, the court overturned a 1971 ruling that required employers to prove a "business necessity" for screening out minorities and women in its hiring practices. That burden of proof, the 1989 court said, should instead be placed on the plaintiff who alleged that his or her client had been unlawfully screened.

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate, deeming this unjust, passed bills that would restore the old law.

...When a motion to override the veto came to the Senate floor, there was question as to whether it would receive the 67 votes needed to pass. The environment was so charged that white supremacist David Duke watched from one section of the Senate gallery while civil rights leader Jesse Jackson stood briefly at the chamber's other end.

Ultimately, the vote fell one short: 66 to 34. Prominent Republican Senators like John H Chaffe, John Danforth, Pete Domenici, and Arlen Specter, all chose to override the veto. McCain - who had earlier voted for a watered down version of the bill, one that didn't reverse the court's decision - backed the president.

This hardly makes McCain another Wallace, but with votes like this, he's hardly trying to advance racial justice either. If McCain expects Obama to "to immediately and personally repudiate [Lewis'] outrageous and divisive comments", McCain should agree to end his campaign's racially charged rhetoric.