Viral e-mails attack Obama’s life story
By BEN SMITH & JONATHAN MARTIN
The main obstacle standing between Barack Obama and the White House was distilled into five words by a local television correspondent in South Charleston, W.Va., earlier this month.
Prefacing a question about the challenges of winning over white, blue-collar voters, the reporter offered this observation: “They think you are un-American,” he said.
Such questions, asked by reporters and plainly on the minds of voters in Appalachia and elsewhere, are the fruits of an unprecedented, subterranean e-mail campaign.
What began as a demonstrably false attempt to cast Obama as a Muslim has now metastasized into something far more threatening to the likely Democratic nominee. The spurious claims about his faith have spiraled into a broader assault that questions his patriotism and citizenship and generally portrays him as a threat to mainstream, white America. The spread of these e-mails has forced Obama to embark on a campaign to Americanize his image and his biography. Pivoting away from his pitch to a primary election audience uninterested in flag-waving and nationalism, he’s returning to the message that first brought him to the national spotlight in 2004: the idea that his is the quintessential American story.
The anti-Obama e-mails now bouncing around the Internet have multiplied and are difficult to track, though the website Snopes.com has catalogued and debunked many of them. But the themes are similar: Elements of his biography make him too exotic, or unknown, to be president.
One features a made-up quote in which Obama “explains” why he purportedly doesn’t place his hand over his heart during the national anthem.
“There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression,” the e-mail quotes Obama as saying. “And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message.”
Obama has never said such a thing.
Another makes the false claim that Obama was sworn into the Senate on the Quran.
He took the oath on the Bible.
Then there is perhaps the least subtle e-mail, “The Genealogy of Barack Hussein Obama in Pictures,” which includes numerous pictures of the candidate’s dark-complexioned relatives on his father’s side in native African garb.
A Pew survey found that one in 10 Americans think Obama is Muslim, a misperception that crosses party lines.
A focus group conducted with 12 independent voters for NBC and The Wall Street Journal earlier this month in Charlottesville, Va., found that fully half said “no” when asked point-blank if they thought of Obama as an American. Two believed he is a Muslim and another mentioned the Quran fabrication.
“They have no sense of his roots,” explained Peter Hart, the Democratic pollster who conducted the survey. “They just are confused, uninitiated and uncertain about who he is and what his background is.” An eye-opening video shot by the online Real News Network earlier this month in West Virginia drove that point home.
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=1507One voter concludes that, “The United States of America should be run by somebody from the United States of America.” When reminded by the reporter capturing the footage that Obama is, in fact, American, the voter responded: “He’s Muslim.”
Nearly every day of the primary, newspaper stories in places from the Pacific Northwest to Pennsylvania have been filled with similar anecdotes.
He’s also hoping that allies — elected officials and labor unions — can tell his story to people who trust them.
Chuck Rocha, the political director of the United Steelworkers union, said that Obama’s Horatio Alger tale would make him an easier sell with white union members.
“Our members couldn’t relate with John Kerry because of his background, where he came from,” Rocha said. “Barack Obama comes from a lot of the same pasts that a lot of our members do — just growing up a regular kid.”
Rocha, whose union endorsed Obama, said union members will “trust us more than some thing they read on the Internet or some other trumped-up lies.”
“It’s going to be an education process,” said Mike Caputo, a United Mine Workers of America official in West Virginia, whose union endorsed Obama on Wednesday.
Obama’s challenge this summer will be to use his unprecedented political celebrity to get his story out.
“Most people don’t know much about Obama’s personal life,” said Vanderbilt University professor John G. Geer, explaining why some voters are susceptible to falsehoods. “He needs to talk about his values. Right now, people are filling in the narrative because he hasn’t filled it.”
And Geer had a candid assessment of why people are accepting falsehoods as truths.
“It’s easier to believe because his name is Barack Obama,” he said.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10546.html
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