Elmer Smith: McCain having trouble putting out the fire

JOHN McCAIN knew more about collateral damage than the grunts who kept his plane aloft.

Ground crews never have to do flyovers. They never have to see the burned-out villages or acres of crops that sometimes go up in flames along with their intended targets.

As a Navy combat pilot, he was probably shocked and saddened by damage reports that revealed the unintended consequences of some of his missions.

Last week at a town-hall meeting at Lakeview South High School, in Minnesota, McCain's face carried the pained expression of a flight commander who has seen the collateral damage of one too many misfires.

That's the way McCain looked to me last week as he confronted the corrosive effects of the acid fueling some of his more rabid supporters.

It was crystallized in the comment of a woman named Gayle Quinnell, who prefaced her question by saying she was afraid of Obama.

"He's an Arab" she said.

"No, ma'am," McCain said as he took the microphone from her hands.

"He's a decent family man, citizen, that I just have disagreements with."

It was the culmination of a week when McCain was forced to douse flames he and his campaign had been fanning.

In Wisconsin, McCain seemed shocked by supporters who shouted "terrorist" and "off with his head" at the mention of Barack Obama's name.

"You do not have to be scared" of an Obama presidency he said in response to supporters who say they fear what will happen if Obama is elected.

This level of fear arises from something beyond the negative ads both campaigns run to distort each other's record. The vitriol McCain is trying to dilute springs from a type of character assassination that shouldn't be tolerated in a presidential campaign.

It starts with McCain's more measured tones in ads that imply that Obama has a secret agenda. What McCain won't say is said by Gov. Sarah Palin, who accuses Obama of "palling around with terrorists."

Hiding out in the bushes are people who dispense the "inside information" that Obama was raised in a school that teaches Muslim youth to hate America, that he does not salute our flag or national anthem.

Of course, those are unauthorized and anonymous. But right behind them are GOP elected officials who have started emphasizing Obama's middle name "Hussein" to prompt comparisons to Saddam Hussein.

Then there were those election officials in Rensselaer County, N.Y., who "overlooked" a "typo" on 300 absentee ballots they sent out mistakenly listing the Democratic candidate as Barack "Osama."

In Virginia, where he is fighting to keep a red state red, McCain reluctantly disavowed remarks by state GOP chairman Jeff Frederick, who was quoted in a magazine saying "Obama and Osama both have friends that bombed the Pentagon. That's scary."

McCain declined to denounce it at first before finally issuing a terse statement saying that his campaign "disagrees with the comparison."

He wasn't alone in having to disavow the comments of a supporter. U.S. Rep. John Lewis compared the negative tone of McCain's campaign to the hateful atmosphere that was purposely stirred by the campaigns of the late Alabama governor George Wallace, an atmoshpere Lewis correctly said had led to the murder of four little girls in a church bombing in Birmingham.

Lewis, a longtime friend of McCain's, later apologized for the misimpression his remark may have caused. Obama quickly issued a statement saying that McCain's campaign is not "in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies."

I see John McCain as an honorable man. I believe he'd like to get his campaign staff and secret surrogates out of their character-assassination mode.

Like the ground crews that kept him aloft in Vietnam, they aren't the ones who have to witness the unintended damage they may have caused.

But it's hard to stuff that genie back in the bottle, almost as hard as it is to rebuild a village destroyed by an off-target air attack. *

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith