not going to vote for him anyway. They're still waiting for Gary Bauer
and William Jennings Bryan to be resurrected.
--- In Dems2008@yahoogroups.com, "azober2000" <azober@...> wrote:
>
>
http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/02/11/obama-s-pe\
sky-muslim-problem.aspx
>
> Can the Muslim Smear Hurt Obama?*
> Andrew Romano
> 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 five** straight contests--Nebraska (68-32 percent),
> Louisiana (57-36), Washington State (68-31)** 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 (Virginia,
> Maryland and Washington, D.C.), 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 (the math isn't rocket science). But if Obama does get the nod,
> I'm starting to wonder if he might find it tougher to peel off
> Republicans than his rhetoric (and the current polling)
> suggests--especially against John McCain. Reading through the comments
> on "He's One of Us Now," a story I wrote for this week's dead-tree
> magazine, I was reminded yesterday of a pesky little problem that
> could hurt him next November: the Muslim rumor.
>
> Over the past few months, it's become clear that there are some shady
> people out there bent on spreading the claim----completely,
> inarguably, demonstrably false--that Obama is a "crypto-Muslim
> Manchurian candidate." It started with a set of untraceable viral
> emails, 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?" (the answer, they add,
> is no). 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"--despite the fact that my
> article had nothing whatsoever to do with Obama's religious
> background. 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 worry that there are swing voters out there concerned
> about terrorism who 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.
>
> *Changed from "Obama's Pesky 'Muslim' Problem," which was, as several
> commenters have pointed out, a misleading headline. I should've
> thought longer and harder about the title instead of posting the first
> thing that came to mind. Apologies to all.
>
> **Knew I was forgetting something. Thanks to commenter Renata29 for
> pointing out my omission.
>
> UPDATE, 5:15 p.m.: Two things in response to the commenters:
>
> 1) I'm not working off of Clinton talking points; I'm working off of
> my own experience and reporting on the campaign trail, where I've
> spoken to dozens of voters over the past few months--and where a
> surprising number, as I note in the article, brought up what they
> called Obama's "Muslim background" as a source of concern. There's a
> big difference between speculating about "hypothetical Republican
> attacks"--which you'll notice I never do--and reporting on
> conversations you've had with actual Americans whose views of the race
> seem to have been colored by these false, bigoted whispers. The
> problem exists, and ignoring it won't make it go away.
>
> 2) Kenny F writes, "It's not innuendo, it's bigotry. Americans are
> queasy now about openly saying that they won't vote for a black
> candidate, so this becames a handy stand-in ("It's in his blood??"
> Yuck). Also, you forget that there is nothing wrong with a Muslim
> candidate, just like there is nothing wrong with an Evangelical one."
> He's absolutely right--and trust me, I didn't forget. But if it wasn't
> clear from the article, let me make it clear now--there's nothing
> wrong with a Muslim candidate. The problem is, a lot of Americans
> (sadly) disagree--and as long as they think Obama's father's Muslim
> childhood somehow makes the Illinois senator suspect--or even just
> less "anti-Jihadi" than McCain--he may have a problem.
>
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