War opens with hints about ‘suspect’ backers.. WHEN Hillary Clinton warned that Barack Obama had not been thoroughly “vetted”, as she has been, she was hinting darkly at trouble to come over her rival’s radical pastor and shady patron in Chicago, the Illinois senator’s home town.
Clinton is convinced that her opponent will be eviscerated by the Republican attack machine should he win the Democratic presidential nomination. That, at any rate, is her camp’s excuse for doing everything it can to discredit him behind the scenes. The battle to tear down Obama and his claim to represent “hope” has begun.
His momentous victory in Iowa and his humbling in New Hampshire have launched a war of attrition between the two camps.
“We have to peel back his identity,” said one elderly white voter in South Carolina, a state Obama must win on January 26. “Did you know his middle name is Hussein? He is a Muslim and was raised in an Islamic school.”
"The same southern voter, who did not wish to be named, then threw another piece of Obama’s biography into the frame. “I looked at his church’s website. It said it was ‘unashamedly black’. They don’t want any whites there. I wouldn’t feel real comfortable if I tried to worship there.”
The unorthodox pastor of Trinity church is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who is refusing all interviews. He married Barack and Michelle Obama and baptised their two daughters. He is already attracting attention on right-wing websites for describing the September 11 attacks as a “wake-up call” to America for ignoring the concerns of “people of colour”, and for claiming that Americans “believe in white supremacy and black inferiority . . . more than we believe in God”.
Wright travelled to meet Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, in the 1980s with Louis Farrakhan, the black supremacist leader of the Nation of Islam, and subscribes to the “Black Values System”, which preaches self-reliance but claims “middle-classness” is ensnaring blacks.
“When enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit Colonel Gadaffi with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell,” Wright once said.
The other potential threat to Obama comes from the indictment of one of his leading donors, Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a Syrian-born property developer in Chicago, who is accused of extortion.
Rezko has been indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald - the prosecutor who brought down the White House official Lewis “Scooter” Libby and the press magnate Conrad Black - for seeking millions of dollars in kickbacks from companies bidding for state business in Illinois. He is due to appear in court on February 24.
On the day the Obamas bought a new home in Chicago for $1.6m in 2005, Rezko’s wife purchased an adjoining piece of land, giving the senator’s family more privacy and a larger expanse of green than they had paid for. Obama later paid $104,000 for a strip of the land, even though it was known that Rezko was under investigation.
The website www.hillaryis44.com widely viewed as an unofficial arm of the Clinton war room, has taken up the scandal with gusto and is offering a "Rezko for Dummies" guide on its site. “Imagine this,” it crows. “A Chicago politician wants things he can’t afford. Wifey likes expensive things and wants a big mansion to live in.” "Bill and Hillary Clinton have worked hard to retain the affection and loyalty of black southerners. However, the former president’s suggestions that Obama is not all he is cracked up to be have caused some offence.
"In a remarkable book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win, Shelby Steele, a conservative intellectual who like Obama had a white mother and black father, writes that Obama’s iconic status as an inspirational African-American also represents his biggest weakness.
Steele argues that Obama offers white voters a chance to free themselves from white guilt, but if he becomes too specific about policy or shows flashes of anger about injustice, they recoil. Obama looks “messianic” set against “the shame of America's racial past”.
If you are an icon, he writes, “you have thoughts to touch everyone’s base, thoughts that recognise and flatter everyone.
"But you have few visible convictions”."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3177684.ece 
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