Insulted today, outraged tomorrow

WASHINGTON — If the presidential campaign were kindergarten, rude people could be sent for a time-out or perhaps made to write “hope and change” repeatedly on the blackboard.

In kindergarten, you’re not allowed to call anyone a monster or make fun of someone’s middle name.

But this is politics, in a land where freedom of speech is carved into the rock of the republic. And these are grown-ups with thick skins stretched over awesome amounts of self-esteem.

It’s a land that has known and survived the scorched-earth politics of the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater, the shark grin of Democratic strategist James Carville, the “rhymes with witch” and “Ozone man” wisecracks of recent years, and the ghosts of distant ages who really knew what nasty campaigning was about.

These days, a cycle of insult and indignation has taken hold in the contest between Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, with supporters of Republican Sen. John McCain gleefully pitching in.

It’s been a time to denounce, dissociate, distance and regret, to nurse tender sensitivities and to see the occasional offender cut from a campaign. Geraldine Ferraro, who resigned a Clinton post Wednesday, was the latest to go.

Obama is generally sanguine about fur flying around him and claws coming at him. But he pays people to get angry on his behalf.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, for one, was outraged when Ferraro declared that Obama has only come this far because he’s black. That left Ferraro outraged at Axelrod’s outrage.

She stepped down as an unpaid Clinton fundraiser after a second day of sniping between the two camps over her remarks.

Politicians were on tiptoes about the episode Thursday as the play-nice ethic came on strong — though conservative pundits had some fun with what they saw as Democrats’ support for race-based affirmative action coming back to bite them.

The scrappy Ferraro, who quit “so I can speak for myself,” refused to speak about it at all during and after a speech to women in Rhode Island.

Samantha Power is a feisty Pulitzer Prize-winning author who calls herself “genocide chick” because of her area of study and passion. The unpaid Obama foreign policy adviser referred to Clinton as a monster, adding with futility that the remark was off the record.

She was gone before the Clinton campaign’s indignation machine could get fully into motion, although it was not to be stopped. Clinton’s aides quickly turned the insult into a money-raising opportunity, campaign cash salving their wounds.

The sensitive tripwire of race has been set off repeatedly, with religion and ethnicity not far behind.

When Clinton ran an ad implying that only she was capable of answering a crisis call at 3 a.m., Obama assured everyone he did not consider it racist. The ad merely implied he was incompetent.

Clinton also was less than adamant in declaring, when asked, that her rival is Christian. That upset some Obama supporters already steamed about false rumors that he’s Islamic.

Clinton usually repackages attacks against her and puts them to her use. But Wednesday night, she struck a different tone with several unusual mea culpas.

She disowned Ferraro’s remarks and also apologized to those offended when her husband seemed to belittle Obama by comparing his achievements to those of Jesse Jackson.

McCain chuckled when a South Carolina voter called Clinton a bad name at a public event in the fall, recovering a few minutes later to speak of his respect for the New York senator. Since then, he’s had to bat down several other coarse comments from supporters.

McCain apologized after a conservative radio host, warming up a campaign crowd, repeatedly invoked Obama’s middle name, Hussein, and called him “the great prophet from Chicago” who wants to sing “Kumbaya” with “world leaders who want to kill us.”

The talk show host was outraged at McCain’s apology.

Now McCain has rebuked Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa for saying terrorists would celebrate if Obama were elected. King couldn’t resist using Obama’s middle name, too. McCain said through a spokesman that King degraded civil discourse.

As for insulting McCain himself, opponents might as well forget it. By now, he’s heard it all.

A man who calls himself “older than dirt” cannot be easily bruised when someone else raises questions about his age. He also rode out a New York Times report that he had inappropriate links with a lobbyist.

As far as one can tell, his aides are not outraged at anything at this time. McCain survived torture in Vietnam. In this campaign, sticks and stones are not likely to break his bones.

Contributing: Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Smithfield, R.I.., and Julie Hirschfeld Davis in Washington