It’s worth being reminded now and again that conservatives really believed this stuff. That Medicare would lead to the eradication of freedom. That the Civil Rights Act was a horrible abridgment of American liberty. That withdrawal from Vietnam would lead to Soviet global domination. That Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget would destroy the economy. And that the people responsible for those — Reagan, Goldwater, Gingrich, etc. — ideas are heroes to be admired.

For different reasons, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush implemented political strategies that were designed to decrease the salience of racial issues in American politics. To Clinton, it was a way to render the Democratic Party safe for moderate white voters. For Bush, it was both a way of presenting himself as a “different kind” of Republicans and also an effort to broaden the GOP coalition to include more Hispanics. Those two strategies helped create the circumstances under which it’s possible for Obama to win. But an Obama victory would, on its own, transform the circumstances and elevate the salience of racial considerations. The McCain campaign has, thus far, hardly been playing by marquess of queensbury rules but (presumably fearing a media backlash) they’ve largely shied away from the explicitly racial stuff — didn’t have Sarah Palin wonder why Barack Obama thinks his kids deserve special treatment in college admissions that her kids don’t get — but it’s been bubbling up from the grassroots recently. On top of that, I think you’d have to assume that a McCain defeat would lead to the ascendancy of anti-immigrant forces within the GOP and the return of a political strategy that doesn’t really care about reaching out to non-whites which would, in turn, make post-2009 GOP candidates less wary of racialized attacks.

As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, including freedom of the press, we’ve really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press, and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege. We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance.

Yes, indeed, a mutually beneficial relationship with those fighting the freedom of the press.