After taking a particularly nasty turn toward the gutter, John McCain has finally tried to temper some of the raw emotion spilling over at recent rallies, much of it stoked by Sarah Palin’s calls that Barack Obama does not see America the way you and I do. Over the weekend, Congressman John Lewis from Georgia charged McCain with “sowing the seeds of hatred and division,” invoking an earlier era of invective which turned to violence. In the third and final debate, will John McCain confront Obama on his threadbare relationship to Bill Ayers? Steve Cobble says he can’t afford to. And recent polls seem to bear that out.

But the McCain/Palin rallies are also tapping into a strain of American populism buoyed by economic anxiety and the drumbeat of fear—fear of war, of financial collapse, and of terror. The Republican Party is throwing them all in the pot.

On GRITtv, Steve Cobble, Former Political Director of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition and Brian Jones a New York based teacher, activist, and writer discuss the tenuous populism upon which the McCain campaign rests.