I think Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin are on to some­thing about the sub­text of all this Ayers stuff bil­low­ing up out of the McCain cam­paign these days. Martin writes:

At best, this is to say that Obama doesn’t believe in Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. At worst, and this is where the new ad goes, it means Obama doesn’t suf­fi­ciently love Amer­ica and is actu­ally apart from it.

And Smith concurs:

It’s not about an obscure ’60s rad­i­cal; it’s about chal­leng­ing Obama’s Amer­i­can­ness, which is why the lan­guage of the ads, delib­er­ately or inad­ver­tently, echoes the lan­guage of viral emails that do that more directly.

But in another sense, I think Martin and Smith stop a step too short in their analy­sis. The Ayers stuff is, as Martin says, “a mere means to an end,” but so is the charge against Obama’s Amer­i­can­ness. Exoti­cism isn’t enough, and the real goal of the hard right–and it’s a goal that until recently the McCain cam­paign has not accepted for itself–is to paint Obama as a very famil­iar (and very Amer­i­can) figure: the black rad­i­cal. The right loves the image of Obama as a black rad­i­cal as much as they pro­fess to fear it, because it’s a figure they know how to use to dev­as­tat­ing elec­toral effect.

Here’s how I peel back the layers of the onion:

Accord­ing to National Review types (who protest per­haps a little too much that their spec­u­la­tions about Obama not about race) what lies behind their con­cerns over Obama’s Amer­i­can­ness is the belief that at his core Obama is noth­ing more than a Manchurian can­di­date for the rad­i­cal left. In the face of all avail­able evi­dence, many of them (most obvi­ously Stan­ley Kurtz, but the others as well) think that if and when Obama’s elected he’s going to swing fur­ther left than Mal­colm X. This is why the ques­tion “Who’s the Real Barack Obama?” has been so effec­tive as a tagline in email smears and now McCain cam­paign ads.

The second layer, obvi­ously (as the AP picked out over the week­end) is race. Saying that Obama is “unamerican” or invok­ing ad nau­seam his ties to an “unrepentant former terrorist” are another way to remind people that Obama is black. (As the AP’s Dou­glass K. Daniel put it, “In a post-​Sept. 11 Amer­ica, ter­ror­ists are envi­sioned as dark-​skinned rad­i­cal Mus­lims, not the home­grown anar­chists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago.”)

The com­bi­na­tion of these two fac­tors is what makes Jere­miah Wright such a ter­ri­fy­ing specter–but also such a potent elec­toral tool–in the eyes of the right. He’s black and rad­i­cal, exactly the person whom the right is con­vinced they’re run­ning against. Or more cyn­i­cally, he’s exactly the person whom they want to be run­ning against. For it is a fact of polit­i­cal his­tory that in Amer­ica there are few better ways to win an elec­tion than to run against the image of an angry black man–and so much the better if he’s yelling “God damn America” at the top of his lungs.

I’m con­vinced that Obama’s elec­toral suc­cess so far has every­thing to do with the fact that he hasn’t let even a whiff of black rad­i­cal­ism attach to his person.* And this suc­cess explains why the right has been so des­per­ate to enlist any sur­ro­gate they can find as a stand in for him, be it Ayers, Wright, or even Michelle. (Remem­ber the National Review’s “Mrs. Grievance” cover with its scary pic­ture of a scold­ing Michelle?) Now that Sarah Palin has declared it open season on Wright, I expect we’re in for one last ugly push to make some­thing stick.

The sad thing about all of this, of course, is that while it has every­thing to do with this elec­tion, it has noth­ing to do with how the pres­i­dent, who­ever he is, is going to handle the next four years lead­ing this coun­try. The happy part is that (fin­gers crossed, breath held) so far the major­ity of Amer­i­cans seem to agree.

++++++++

* Note: That this is a prac­ti­cal require­ment of Amer­i­can pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics is not some­thing I’m happy about, but I think it would be hard to dis­pute as a fact.