PHILADELPHIA) As the crowd cheered at a Sarah Palin rally this morning in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a man in the audience grinned as he held up a stuffed monkey doll with a Barack Obama bumper sticker wrapped across its forehead.
The incident came at a time when McCain and Palin’s events have increasingly been fueled by angry crowds, since Palin began drawing a connection between Barack Obama and 1960s radical William Ayers, claiming that the Democratic nominee has a history of “palling around” with a terrorist.
At a rally in Lakeville, Minnesota, on Friday, McCain was booed after he called on his audience to be respectful of Obama. The Republican nominee took the microphone away from one woman who said she couldn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.”
After Palin finished her remarks this morning, the man holding the stuffed monkey seemed to notice that a video camera was pointed at him, at which point he removed the Obama sticker from the doll’s head and crumpling it up in his hand. He then handed the doll to a young boy who was watching the rally from his father’s shoulders. The boy’s parents later told CBS News that they weren’t acquainted with the man who gave their son the stuffed monkey.
