What If They Held A Rally And Nobody Came?

I guess that John McCain's "Forgotten Americans" rally in historic Selma, Alabama forgot to tell the Americans he was trying to reach that they were invited.

But as you take a look at the shot, which is just off to my left here, you can see that the audience in large measure is white middle-class voters. The African-American poor folk of Selma, Alabama and around here haven’t turned out.

Is there any question why they wouldn't be there? Outside of the fact that McCain voted against the MLK holiday in 1983, his vision for America offers nothing for the poor and actually presumes that they've had it pretty good in the Bush years.



McCain is also signaling, after all these years of being a deficit hawk, that he'll toe the familiar Republican line that deficits don't matter as much as tax cuts for the wealthy. And despite the campaign finance reform bona fides he's devised a system to get around contribution limits with a giant unaccountable slush fund. Shockingly, he's also failing to get traction with downscale voters, despite running a campaign suited to the aristocracy. Maybe all the black people in Selma were just busy today.