GEORGE ALLEN….In a campaign season filled to the gills with ginned up absurdities, perhaps the most absurd of them all has been George Allen’s desperation last-minute attacks on Jim Webb over some racy scenes in one of his war novels. This ranks high on the short-list of campaign stunts that deserve to blow up in the most gruesome possible way, if only to serve as a warning to future politicians: No, the American public is not willing to put up with literally anything. Yes, you can go too far.
That, along with revelations of Allen’s youthful ? and possibly lingering ? racism really ought to be enough to send him packing. But in case it’s not, Ed Kilgore provides more:
I personally think the most damning thing about the Allen Story is that he has been exposed as the ultimate Golden State Child of Privilege who has spent much of his life trying to impersonate a dirt-farm, dirt-track Yahoo, mainly by aggressively embracing the underside of Yahoo culture, without the mitigating circumstances of actually growing up that way, or any indication that he shares the positive features of that culture (e.g., a healthy disrespect for economic elites). To put it another way, most true southern white crackers may well have contempt for those well-heeled cultural elitists who look down on them, but they’d also kill to give their kids the kind of advantages that George Allen had, and, if confronted directly with the full Allen Story, would probably consider his efforts to remake himself as a ‘bacca-chewing, thuggish redneck the ultimate insult.
Allen is a fake in much the same way that George Bush is a fake ? except that he’s not quite as good as it. Perhaps Virginians will finally cotton to Allen’s peculiar brand of condescension next week.
