The other day, I was browsing through the Herald archives — a procrastination technique I’ve come to cherish during my time here. Although most readers would probably find the bell-bottom advertisements from 1969 or the “Star Wars” review from 1977 most worthy of attention, I — for one conspicuous reason or another — have dedicated particular study to the editorial pages of yore.

I was most curious to read the presidential endorsements of past editorial boards. Although the Herald began as a rabidly right-winged tabloid, and it remains to this day the more conservative of the two campus papers, the Editorial Board has long since given up straying so far away from the campus mainstream as to endorse a Republican presidential candidate. I’m not talking about the relatively obvious decisions to reject the buffoonery the GOP has offered in the last two elections. I’m talking about endorsing real losers — guys like Michael Dukakis.

The Dukakis endorsement from 1988 — when the Massachusetts Democrat was running against Bush Sr. and simultaneously trying to suppress his natural New England inclination to support rape and murder — was a stunningly lengthy discussion of strategic defense policy and budget concerns, but most importantly, constituencies.

After watching the Bush campaign slander Dukakis with racially charged attack ads veiled as “law and order” policy, the Editorial Board came to the conclusion that the party of Lincoln had effectively given up on winning black votes and — armed with a Reagan coalition including millions of Southern whites fearful of minority-influence in America — had no need to advance the interests of the nation’s oppressed.

I can’t help but feel the same way about the current presidential election. Sen. John McCain, a man whose public service is worthy of considerable praise from liberals and conservatives alike, has unwittingly become a pawn in the same cultural war that defined the Reagan and Bush elections.

McCain is not a right-winger, and he’s not a racist. But he’s a member of the Republican Party running against the first minority nominee in American history. The political opportunity to capitalize on the deep-seated racial animosity in this country is simply too delicious for his campaign to forgo.

It’s really not that hard to insert the racial question into the campaign. All you’ve got to do is get a sheriff talking about Barack Hussein Obama and run an ad associating the candidate with a sinister-looking black man vaguely connected to the financial crisis. Technically, it’s all above the belt. Hussein is Obama’s middle name, and the ad featuring the former chief of Fannie Mae purports to bring up only questions relating to the financial crisis.

That’s the beauty of it. Sounding off racial and cultural alarms is so easy that the only people who will bother responding are a few liberals at the New York Times and, apparently, Gerald Cox. Obama can’t respond because he can’t remind the voters he thinks about race as much as they do.

The late Lee Atwater, architect of the Reagan and Bush victories and former chair of the Republican Party, explained the technique of injecting race into presidential politics to political science professor Alexander Lamis:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Using America’s fear of black people and Arabs against Barack Obama is indeed lowbrow, but so is the Miller High Life guy. Neither offer concrete descriptions of the product being marketed, but both send a strong cultural message: We’re like you.

Miller is actually a South African-owned beer that doesn’t taste particularly good, but it represents our brat-eating, baseball-watching way of life. That’s what Sarah Palin is all about. She’s an idiot. But that doesn’t mean we can’t feel close to her and garner a sense of comfort from her that the dark-skinned community organizer (i.e. helps other dark-skinned people) with an Arab name doesn’t give us.

Not that the Obama campaign doesn’t play around with innuendos as well. Remember McCain’s seven houses? The Democrats — indeed the candidate himself –, didn’t hesitate to paint McCain as an out- of-touch aristocrat, sheltered in a bubble of wealth and beltway politics. Almost any economic ad put out by Obama hammers home the message that McCain doesn’t “understand people like us.” People like us, meaning poor, working people.

So, in the end, most of us won’t vote based on policy or even vague ideals of good government. We will vote based on cultural alignment. Most college students will vote against the guy who reminds them of their grandfather, and most senior citizens will vote against the guy who, if he doesn’t come from the wrong region of the world, must certainly come from the wrong side of town.

Jack Craver ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in history and French.