I watched the election results last night with someone who, whenever a state would go to McCain, say, "Oh, well that's because <state> is racist." Mississippi, racist. Alabama, racist. Georgia, racist. At a certain level, feelings of racism are at play in a particularly strong way in the South, but to claim that an entire state is racist because they didn't vote for the black guy... well, that strikes me as immature. I merely point out the example to show that it's not strictly Republicans who are immature or like to paint their opposition with a broad, and predominantly incorrect, brush.
That said, if you were to do a rhetorical analysis of the speeches, you'd definitely notice how the crowd reacts differently to the mention of the opposition if it's McCain speaking versus Obama. Obama had hundreds of thousands of people at his acceptance speech last night, and when he mentioned John McCain and his service to the country, there was no booing; hell, there was even some polite applause. The polar opposite was true in McCain's concession speech, where he had to quiet the boos of the audience at the mention of Obama. It strikes me that it is indicative of the way the campaigns were run from the outset; McCain himself avoided going overtly negative, but right-wing pundits accused Obama of being a secret Muslim, a terrorist, a socialist, a communist, being born in Kenya, having his grandmother killed to stifle his birth records coming out... You just did not hear that level of unjustified and blatantly false attack being made by left wing pundits about McCain. When that sort of energy is being used to invigorate your constituency, it is not even remotely surprising that their vitriol is going to reach such a fevered pitch that they will legitimately want to see Obama killed (my Army friend came down for Halloween and mentioned that one of the more popular costumes at his base was dressing up as Obama with a noose around your neck). There's a real danger in using that level of false propaganda to whip your base into hating the opposition to that degree, in that it creates a level of divisiveness within our society that is very difficult to overcome. I don't hate people who supported McCain over Obama, but I have had people yell at me for daring to vote for a "ni**er" (and this is in a blue state, mind you).
I hope that we can move beyond this hugely divisive rift and realize that, at the end of the day, no matter our political differences, we are all still Americans.
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