During the last week of September, a group of college students at the Christian George Fox University in Oregon — a state that's gone Democratic in the past five presidential elections — hanged a cardboard cutout of Sen. Barack Obama from a tree near a main academic hall. Last weekend in rural Pennsylvania, a man danced a stuffed monkey with an Obama sticker fashioned into a hat in front of cameras. Calls of "terrorist," "kill him" and "off with his head" have all been maligned over the past week.

This election has taken a violent turn — it's completely irrefutable.

I think what we're seeing is the climax of trends I've noticed elsewhere in the campaign. In November of last year, when asked by a supporter, "How do we beat the bitch?" McCain responded, "That's an excellent question." He eventually arrived at a statement "I respect Senator Clinton and I respect anyone who gets the nomination of the Democratic Party," but it felt hollow next to the intensity of the woman's attack. Sen. Clinton, for her part, when arguing in her rationale for not dropping out of the race last spring, stated, "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June."

The trend is twofold: It's of both leveraging anger and of failing to respect the weight of verbal cues delivered on the global stage.

Some have argued that McCain is a genuine racist. They've pointed to recent turns in campaign rhetoric and his 1983 opposition to the adoption of a national Martin Luther King holiday as evidence of prejudice. Books about McCain have highlighted his extensive use of the word "gook" to describe the guards who tortured him in Hanoi, a fact he didn't try to hide during the 2000 campaign. Despite the accusations, I'm not ready to condemn McCain as a racist.

I am ready, however, to condemn him for running a campaign that falls far beneath the honorability he has based his career upon. McCain has ridden a tide of nobility since his return from Hanoi. A massive gambling habit, the Keating scandal and allegations of anger and abuse have failed to derail the McCain narrative — the narrative that he is as noble, patriotic and authentic as an American can be.

McCain is an American hero; he's also a politician campaigning on virulent, fear-mongering tactics that have no place in our politics. Tactics that have put lives in danger.

The two facts are not mutually exclusive and should stop being looked at as such.

Those would-be assassination plots that the media have gotten a hold of have proven far less cogent than they initially seemed. A felon caught outside Obama's home with a handgun and bulletproof vest in his car proved the grandson of the publisher of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation's highest profile black news outlets. He's a member of an ardently pro-Obama family, and alleges he was looking for a job. Three arrested in conjunction with a plan to assassinate Obama in Denver with a high-powered rifle failed to advance plans past a nascent state before being arrested. They had the incorrect location of Obama's hotel, were in possession of methamphetamines and paraphernalia, and never posed a substantial threat to the senator.

Nonetheless, they should remind us all of the dangers of political life and bring us back to the dozens of tragic and nearly tragic assassination plots that have plagued the modern American story: Reagan, Ford, George Wallace, Clinton, Carter, the Kennedys.

The turn in this campaign is an embarrassment to America and all that have supported her. Military men and women are taught that they are responsible for the entire chain of command beneath them. Beneath McCain is a network telling those that will be canvassing the nation to stress similarities between Obama and bin Laden, as Time has reported.

This stirring of prejudice brings us back to our nation's original sin, and reminds us that we're a nation still grappling with xenophobia, even if perpetrated by only a vocal minority.

McCain still has time to restore honorability to his campaign. Joe Biden said last week that McCain may regret the way he's run his campaign for the rest of his life. He doesn't have to, though. He can still rein in supporters and volunteers and live up to the narrative that has made him.

Brian Till can be contacted at brian.m.till@gmail.com. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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