Update: The widely reported story of an assault on a McCain campaign worker by a black man shouting Obama slogans has now been exposed as a hoax, making this story about a real attack on an Obama volunteer even more relevant.

Update 2: More on McCain volunteer Ashley Todd’s beating hoax from HuffPo (here, here, and “an echo of the Charles Stuart case” here) and CNN.  FOX News predicts: “Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.”

Update 3 (from Ramey): According to TPM, McCain’s Pennsylvania Communications Director apparently pushed “an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established — and even told reporters outright that the “B” carved into the victim’s cheek stood for ‘Barack.’”

As Eugenia posted earlier this week, a Barack Obama volunteer, 58-year-old Nancy Takehara of Chicago, was physically assaulted on Saturday by a homeowner while canvassing in Caledonia, Wisconsin. Takehara told a local television station that the man “grabbed me by the back of the neck” and “was pounding on my head and screaming.” According to Takehara, the man yelled, among other things, that “we’re not his people, we’re probably with ACORN.”

The attacker has now been identified as 71-year-old Ronald Goetsch, a McCain supporter and Marine veteran who has donated to the McCain campaign. In a local television interview, Goetsch admits that he attacked Takehara after engaging her in a verbal dispute. Goetsch claims that Takehara was “being loud” but acknowledges that she did not physically threaten him in any way.

The local Republican party released a loathsome statement that expressed no regret or sympathy over the attack. Instead, it actually seemed to justify Goetsch’s statements to Takehara by again raising the phony specter of ACORN: “As we read press accounts of alleged violence against an Obama campaign worker and accounts of ACORN registration fraud, coupled with daily complaints from both parties of stolen or vandalized yard signs, the Racine County Republican Party would like to encourage supporters of both sides to take a deep breath…” Talk about blaming the victim.

That party statement would seem to confirm the concerns of Dawn Teo at the Huffington Post, who includes the Wisconsin incident in a list of “escalating” incidents of intimidation and violence against Obama supporters over the past couple of weeks, from death threats left in mailboxes to a dead bear cub strung with Obama signs. Teo rightly blames this increasingly poisonous atmosphere on the increasingly irresponsible rhetoric of the McCain-Palin campaign, which is “actively promoting a perception of Barack Obama as an enemy, not as an opponent.”

Finally, it seems fair to ask to what extent this attack might have been racially motivated. This is especially true given what Takehara reported Goetsch said to her: “we’re not his people.” As an Asian American, hearing those words gives me a chill; it echoes those familiar phrases Asian Americans are so used to hearing, like “you don’t belong here” and “go back where you came from.” Let’s hope that the statement “you’re not our people” was just misguided partisan rhetoric and not something more insidious.