COLUMBIA, S.C. –For over a year, largely out of the media glare, Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign has been fighting a determined, low-intensity conflict against the viral e-mail that forwards the myth that Obama is a crypto-Muslim Manchurian candidate.
Among the campaign’s first hires in January 2007 were two opposition researchers who didn't begin with the traditional round of research into their boss's past, or his rivals' records. Instead, they were immediately assigned to debunk the widely circulated anonymous set of e-mails.
"We've been bird-dogging it from the beginning," said Devorah Adler, Obama's research director. "The first research document that I put together was a response to the 'Who is Barack Obama?' e-mail."
The e-mails aren’t a well-funded, faux-grassroots smear like the attacks on John Kerry's war record.
Instead, most observers believe, it's a largely organic expression of a dark place in the American consciousness. And the campaign is aware it is operating in a changed media landscape in which a powerful, false idea can spread deep into the American psyche, almost entirely under the radar of the mainstream media and with no authoritative broadcast voice to put it to rest.
Obama's aides have found their way, piecemeal, through this uncharted territory. The campaign has developed a sophisticated set of responses that have required the assistance of virtually every part of the campaign. The effort kicked into high gear in mid-November when Adler's deputy, Shauna Daly, posted on the campaign website a detailed dossier debunking the claims. The campaign's national faith director, Joshua DuBois, meanwhile, gathered testimonials from religious leaders on the candidate's Christian faith. The campaign's web team developed a special Internet form for supporters to send out their own mass e-mails.
The campaign has distributed talking points refuting the claims to its army of organizers, created video testimonials from fellow parishioners at his church and sent mailings touting Obama's Christianity.
The success or failure of their efforts may be a test of Obama's oft-stated faith in the American electorate.
"The American people are I think smarter than folks give them credit for," he said in response to a question about the viral e-mail at a Jan. 15, 2008, MSNBC debate in Las Vegas.
Still, Obama has begun incorporating his response to attacks on his religion into his stump speech in South Carolina, offering an animated defense of his faith at every stop.
He paces the stage with a microphone. He feigns disbelief. His tone is cheeky and defiant.
"People have been sending out e-mails saying I'm a Muslim," Obama said Thursday in Beaufort. "I am a member of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. We worship an awesome God."
The roar in the gymnasium was deafening, reaching a decibel level matched only by the squealing response to his introduction.
"I have been a member of the same church – the same Christian church – for almost 20 years," he says. "My wife and I were married in that church. Our children were dedicated in that church. I was sworn in [to the Senate] on the family Bible."
No mainstream observer, right or left, questions Obama's story of his faith. The whisper campaign has its origin, according to a report in The Nation, in an August 2004 press release from an obscure conservative publicist. Another little-known conservative author – who had also speculated that John McCain was a KGB agent – regurgitated the charges in December of 2006, and from there they rapidly made their way into the widely circulated e-mails.
Most of his aides, like most observers, don't think the e-mails are – or could be – subject to political control.
"I don't have any suspicion that it's the Clintons or their allies," said Obama's deputy campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand.
Obama himself, though, has hinted that he isn't so sure the e-mails don't have political roots, though he's never suggested Clinton is behind them.
Though his public stance has typically been a combination of sorrow and amusement at the proliferation of the slander, he displayed a touch of anger in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network this month.
"We have no way of tracing where these e-mails come from, but what I know is they come in waves, and they somehow appear magically wherever the next primary or caucus is, although they're also being distributed all across the country. But the volume increases as we get closer to particular elections," he said. "That indicates to me that this is something that is being used to try to raise doubts or suspicions about my candidacy."
The campaign's first public test in regards to the e-mail came on Jan. 17, 2007, not long after the researchers were first hired, when Insight Magazine, followed by Fox News, reported, falsely, that Obama had attended a radical Islamic madrassa as a child in Indonesia.
The researchers were immediately on the phone to Jakarta, scrambling for details and coping with a 12-hour time difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment