Before he gained fame as the sheriff of Mayberry, Andy Griffith played a character named Lonesome Rhodes in a 1957 movie called “A Face in the Crowd.”

Griffith is almost unrecognizable in the movie. As small-town radio personality Rhodes, he’s a study in contrasts. On air, Rhodes is the homespun, witty, “aw shucks” country boy everyone loves. Behind the scenes, he’s coarse and abusive, often ridiculing the naiveté and ignorance of his adoring audience.

Rhodes gets his comeuppance when a technician purposely leaves the microphone on after one of his shows ends. Rhodes is caught on air calling his listeners “idiots.”

“This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep!” he says in the movie. “Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers — everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle ... They’re mine! I own ’em!”

The betrayed fans call for Rhodes’ job. He eventually loses both his job and sanity.

The end scene makes you cringe. You hear Rhodes hysterically yelling “come back, come back” out of his penthouse window.

Missouri 6th District Rep. Sam Graves is no Lonesome Rhodes. But I think about that character every time I see Graves’ campaign ads attacking Kay Barnes for her “San Francisco values.”

In case you missed it, but I don’t see how, the campaign ad shows a strangely attired and presumably gay trio dancing together somewhere in San Francisco. The trio consists of a black man, black woman and a white female, all supposedly icons of a liberally hedonistic “San Francisco lifestyle” that Kay Barnes supposedly supports.

The ad passes under the guise of being against same-sex marriage. But a closer look reveals something more dubious and eerily familiar.

It’s the same sort of fear tactic the Bush administration used to sell the Iraq war. Daily terror alerts and talk about WMD preyed on our ignorance and kept us fearing for our safety. In Graves’ case, it’s a fear of decay in our morals.

I wonder how much of this message Graves actually believes. It also makes me wonder what Graves actually believes about his Northwest Missouri constituency.

On some level you’d have to think his camp sees us as an intolerant, racist bunch. We’re rubes who actually believe that gays and mixed couples are dying to come here and destroy our solid Midwestern values. And if we vote for Kay Barnes, we’re going to see more of these folks here in good old wholesomely intolerant Northwest Missouri.

Something here gave Graves confidence enough to think such crude tactics would float, as if he were preaching to the choir by endorsing this ad.

When we don’t think for ourselves, these tactics work. And we give the green light for insults to our intelligence.

We’re gullible enough to believe, or they think we’re gullible enough to believe, that George W. actually chops wood on his ranch, Hillary drinks beer and shoots pool regularly, and Sarah Steelman shops for hunting rifles.

I’ve worked on the factory floor with plenty of guys who did all those things. Never once did I think it would make them good political leaders.

Circus promoter P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. As long as we swallow these political sideshows, we’ll never be respected as thinking people.

Alonzo Weston can be reached

at alonzow@npgco.com.