Is there anything else that is "obvious race baitig" in the mailer?

I've found pretty obscure readings of literature, but this seems a bit...of a stretch.

Really.

unless there was something else flagrantly overt in the email, i think you're grasping at a thin straw here.

But I think the writer of that McCain email is actually playing off a familar refrain about Ronald Reagan:

Reagan never considered himself a professional politician.  He did not run for president to be somebody, but rather to "do things."  He had nothing to prove to anyone.

icky right-wing link enclosed

Or another example, from an Amazon review of Reagan's autobiography:

From a reluctant governor, Reagan matured to a candidate who sought the presidency, not to be somebody, but to do something.

Finally, a non-conservative (basically), Jeff Greenfield, used it in a 1996 Time article:

Ronald Reagan is now regarded as a giant political figure, a man who won and who retained his popularity by offering a clear ideological message, one of those rare Presidents who run for office not to be somebody but to do something.

That phrase was the first thing I thought of when I read the email excerpt, since I remember it being used throughout the Nineties by TV pundits favorably contrasting Reagan with Clinton and, before that, the first President Bush. So my read was Reagan dog-whistle, not anti-Jackson racist dog-whistle.

If anything, it's an implicit attack on Hillary, who the right-wingers (and the media) always accuse of only wanting power for its own sake. The person who responded on Ackerman's site seemed to pick up on this.

i grew up in the DC area; politics and government are the primary industries here. you have to be almost willfully deaf, dumb and blind to avoid it.

i remember well the jackson "campaign", short-lived as it was. actually, by comparison to sen. obama, rev. jackson was much more experienced. i don't happen to remember that particular bit, but then i get inundated with congressional stuff on a daily basis, and i don't remember all of that either.

I heard Jackson speak those words in person during the 1988 campaign.

McCain has repeatedly made the point that he is running to serve the country as an extension of his belief that is what a patriot does. Serve the country.

Therefore is disavowal makes perfect sense. He is not doing it for "ego."

But since 99.9% of you have, most likely, never listened to what McCain has said, you have zero real information and must remember to be insulted when told to be insulted by your masters.

JJ's poem is beautiful and affirmative.

This campaign is like lancing a boil in America's soul.

Not a stretch...not a reach...not at all.

BTD is right on the money.  It is a deliberate word choice with a resonating message...and easy to dismiss/deny as so many responses on this thread testify.  "Paranoid" they will innocently say.

I do not believe that it is racist.