Make It Obama in 08

Barack Obama had a good weekend. For starters, he opened a lead of 84 pledged delegates and 200,000 popular votes by crushing Hillary Clinton in four straight contests–Nebraska (68-32 percent), Louisiana (57-36) and the U.S. Virgin Islands (90-8) on Saturday, followed by a surprisingly sizable win in Maine (59-40) on Sunday. He beat Bill Clinton to win best spoken audiobook at yesterday’s Grammy Awards. And he had the pleasure of watching as Clinton removed campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle (also chief liaison to Latinos) from her team–a sure sign that staffers and supporters are worried about Hillary’s wobbly bid. The good news will probably continue for the next ten days; Obama leads by at least 17 points in each of Tuesday’s Potomac Primary battles and is expected to win in liberal, educated Wisconsin and his birth state of Hawaii a week later.

All of which got me thinking about the general election. Sure, the Illinois senator is a long way from clinching the Democratic nomination. First he has to survive Ohio and Texas on March 4 and Pennsylvania on April 22–states that are rich in delegates and far more favorable to Clinton than February’s Obama-friendly face-offs. Even then, the fight will probably go all the way to the convention in August. But if Obama does get the nod, you have to wonder if he might find it tougher to peel off Republicans than his rhetoric suggests–especially against John McCain.

Over the past few months, it’s become clear that there are some shady people out there bent on spreading the claim that Obama is a “crypto-Muslim Manchurian candidate.” It started with a set of E-Mails which say that “Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background” and ask “Can a good Muslim become a good American?” And it has continued with trolls like “HolyRoller,” a monomaniacal individual now infecting the “He’s One of Us Now” comment board, where he’s busy posing questions like “To all you Obama supporters: Is he Shiite or Sunni?” and lamenting “how foolish we have become” now that “a large segment of our population wants one of the [Islamic] devils to be their President”  The Obama campaign has been waging a determined, low-intensity war against the smear since January 2007, and the candidate himself has repeatedly weighed in. His typical response? “The American people are, I think, smarter than folks give them credit for.”

He’s mostly right. If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he’ll have plenty of time before Election Day to tell voters that he’s been “a member of the same church, the same Christian church, for almost 20 years”–enough, I’m sure, to reach all but the most willful bigots (who probably wouldn’t vote for him anyway). But what if correcting the record isn’t the problem? After a few months on the trail, I’m starting to suspect that swing voters worried about terrorism won’t be willing to “take a risk” on someone who has ANY links to the Muslim world–as irrelevant as those links may be. Over the past two months, I’ve had at least a dozen people respond to my rote question–What do you think of Barack Obama?–by worrying aloud about his “Muslim background.” I’m always quick to tell them that he’s not a Muslim, but it rarely makes a difference. Take Vicki Hercsky, 47, a teacher from Boca Raton, Florida. “Obama, I don’t even know how he got where he is,” she told me after a Rudy Giuliani event late last month. “Why do you say that?” I asked. “He’s Muslim,” she replied, matter-of-factly. I stammered. “Well, um, his father was raised Muslim but was an agnostic by the time Barack was born,” I said. “Obama is a Christian.” Hercsky wasn’t swayed. “Yeah, but he has it in his blood,” she said. “You can’t take away what’s given to you. It’s given to you for a reason, and that’s who you are. That’s who he is.” I’m not sure what she meant by “it,” or “who he is”–and I’m not sure I want to know.

In a general election battle, the macho, militaristic McCain would make a mighty effort to focus voters’ attention on national security. He’d contrast his experience–“I’ve been involved in every major national security issue for the last 20 years, and in some ways the last 40,” he’s fond of saying–with Obama’s rather light foreign policy resume. And he’d deploy the phrase “radical Islamic extremism” whenever possible. In that kind of contest, Obama doesn’t want moderate Republicans–voters he hopes to add to his “coalition for change”–wondering whether he’s “an Islamic sympathizer,” in HolyRoller’s ignorant formulation, or even listening to Rush Limbaugh repeat “Hussein” (the senator’s middle name) over and over again. It’s not like national-security voters need to believe that Obama is a practicing Muslim; they just need to suspect that he’s not as strongly “anti-Muslim” as McCain. I’ve seen how easy it is to sow those seeds of doubt–and how tenaciously they blossom. To decide solely on such irrelevant innuendo would be stupid. But people do stupid things when they’re scared, and after hearing what I’ve heard on the trail, I’m not so sure that some of them wouldn’t decide that way regardless.

This article was taken from Newsweek’s blog by Andrew Romano in part.  Some aspects have been changed but has been kept mostly intact.  It is a very good insight into the troubles Obama is currently dealing with regarding rumors and slanderous campaign tactics.