McCain/Palin Crowd Getting Ugly

Jake Tapper of ABC News and Dana Milbank of The Washington Post are reporting that the tone being set by McCain's pit bull, Sarah Palin, has crowds turning ugly at campaign events. From WaPo:

Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

And, from Tapper:

This does not appear an isolated incident. Yesterday at a McCain rally, after McCain asked "Who is the real Barack Obama?" a member of the audience yelled "Terrorist!" And so on.

And, lest you think that these are reporters with active imaginations, ask yourself why the press is not allowed to mingle with the crowd at campaign events?

When reporters tried to leave the designated press area and head toward the bleachers where the crowd was seated, an escort would dart out of nowhere and confront him or her and say, "Can I help you?'' and turn the person around.

When one reporter asked an escort, who would not give her name, why the press wasn't allowed to mingle, she said that in the past, negative things had been written.

With Palin employing "Barack the Boogieman" rhetoric, and a speaker at her rally invoking the "Hussein" card, it's not hard to see why the McCain campaign wants the press to stay in their cage, but these things have a way of getting out of control. When these tensions flared during the primaries, the candidates wisely declared a truce, but there doesn't appear to be an olive branch in the offing this time.

Caleb Howe, Christina Cedeno, Tom Fitzsimmons, and I will be doing live debate commentary tonight on a special episode of Unusable Signal. Click Here to listen live at 9pm, or to hear the archive afterwards.