Dropping the "A" Bomb

Perhaps this post is a bit tardy, but it should serve as a reminder about certain sentiments, and I should certainly remind any readership of it in coming months.

I can't even say that I find this particular sentiment sad...rather, I find it quite pathetic.

John McCain began launching the first in his series of campaign ads in the fairly recent past, affixing the slogan "The American President Americans have been waiting for." Then came the inevitable attacks, as one would expect. Personally, my first thought would be to attack the use of a preposition in concluding the sentence. Rather, it was the use of the term "American" which sparked the outcry.

It would seem that the use of that term can now be considered racist.

The theory used to validate such claims is that the usage of "American President" was aimed squarely at Barack Obama, challenging his Americanness. Yet not only is this theory unsubstantiated, it is unsubstantiatable. As a point of contention, Republican candidates tend to inject their campaigns with large doses of patriotism, to sometimes extreme levels. With no other metaphors, verbal or visual, which could be used to definitively portray Obama as a specific target, other than this one word, the sentiment that there can be racial overtones for an American candidate to refer to himself as an American while campaigning for an office whose title is even used by a multitude of other offices and in other nations is discouraging and troubling.

That one may attack based solely upon this unfounded "theory" merely reflects ones own sense of inadequacy or inferiority, and that more than anything reflects the desperation felt by the Democrats at this point in time.