Sunday, October 26, 2008

O Pfotenhauer! O Macaca!

When Mr. Sponge put up a video several days ago of McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer opining that John McCain candidacy would resonate in the "real Virginia" away from the suburbs of D.C., Spot thought to himself, "Boy, that woman sounds familiar."

It took Frank Rich's column today to put it together:

That would be in 2006 [during the campaign], when he capsized his own shoo-in re-election race by calling a 20-year-old Indian-American “macaca” before a white audience (and a video camera). “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen told the young Democratic campaign worker for good measure, in a precise preview of the playbook that has led John McCain and Sarah Palin to their tawdry nadir two years later.

Rich continues:

Cut to 2008. You’d think that this incident would be a cautionary tale, but the McCain campaign instead embraced Allen as a role model, with Palin’s odes to “real” and “pro-America” America leading the charge. The farcical apotheosis of this strategy arrived last weekend, again on camera and again in Virginia, when a McCain adviser, Nancy Pfotenhauer, revived Allen’s original script, literally, during an interview on MSNBC.

After dismissing the Northern Virginia suburbs, she asserted that the “real Virginia” — the part of the state “more Southern in nature” — will prove “very responsive” to the McCain message. All Pfotenhauer left out was “macaca,” but with McCain calling Barack Obama’s tax plan “welfare” and campaign surrogates (including the robo-calling Rudy Giuliani) linking the Democrat to violent, Willie Horton-like criminality, that would have been redundant.

Of course! Nancy Pfotenhauer is kind of a Halloween reincarnation of the venomous George Allen. Let's watch the video again and see if you seen the resemblance, boys and girls:

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