FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right: McCain Miami Rally, Getting Ugly Down Here
After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that’s what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.
The event maybe lasted a minute, two at the most, before police competently managed to hustle the two away from the scene and out of the danger zone. Only FiveThirtyEight tracked the two men down for comment, a quarter mile down the street.
“People were screaming ‘Terrorist!’ ‘Communist!’ ‘Socialist!'” Sorando said when we caught up with him. “I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me.”
Asked what had precipitated the event, “We were just chanting ‘Obama!’ and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy.”
FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right: McCain Miami Rally, Getting Ugly Down Here
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On Saturday, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) gave little-noticed remarks at Sioux City’s West High School during an appearance by Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK). King went beyond the traditional right-wing talking points — which brand Obama a “Marxist” who adheres to “socialism” — and said that he would turn the United States into a “totalitarian dictatorship.” From a report by the Iowa Independent:
King, known for provocative, partisan remarks, suggested Obama actually could be classified as even more extreme than a socialist. King also said his party is the only one with a legitimate claim on representing freedom as Americans know it.
“When you take a lurch to the left you end up in a totalitarian dictatorship,” King said. “There is no freedom to the left. It’s always to our side of the aisle.” …
Speaking in Exira, IA on Aug. 21, King claimed that Obama was anti-American and raised by polygamists and “left wing hard core atheists”:
“Obama was not raised with an intentional attitude toward Americanism. … The way to look at the reasons Obama doesn’t place his hand over his heart when the National Anthem is playing, or wear an American flag pin is primarily because he is not willful or spiteful, but because it just doesn’t occur to him because it’s not the way he’s been raised. American patriotism is not imprinted on his mind or in his heart, because he wasn’t raised as an American.”