Inventing a Country-Club Muslim Marxist
The smear campaign against Obama continues
The only notable difference this year is that
neither the money nor the message has crystallized yet behind any “independent” effort to destroy the candidacy of Barack Obama. Whether such
a campaign against him can be mounted effectively remains to be seen,
but it will not fail for lack of trying.
Back in 2004, the Swift Boat group’s attack on Kerry commenced in earnest with the August publication of Unfit for Command,
a book purporting to prove that the Democratic nominee’s decorations
for courage as a Navy officer in Vietnam were undeserved and that he
had fabricated his sterling military record. Those sensational charges
won immense publicity for the authors and were soon augmented by a wave
of national advertising, with millions in seed money provided by a
group of wealthy Bush supporters based in Texas. Of course, the fingerprints of Karl Rove, then the president’s top political strategist, were all over that ugly episode.
This August will mark the publication of the first book-length screed against Mr. Obama, courtesy of Regnery Publishing, the house responsible for the scurrilous smearing of Kerry. At work on the Obama tome is David Freddoso, a young writer from the stable of the National Review, whose byline has also appeared in the ultra-right-wing magazine Human Events and who was reportedly trained by Robert Novak, the conservative “prince of darkness.”
His straightforward title is The Case Against Barack Obama.
Competing with Freddoso’s book for talk-radio promotion and cable
airtime will be a similar product by Jerome Corsi, one of the authors of Unfit for Command, who has migrated from Regnery to a Simon & Schuster imprint. With some what labored cleverness, his book will be titled The Obama Nation, and is likely to posit, among many other implausible claims, that the Illinois senator is under the influence of the defunct Communist Party USA.
Aside from such far-fetched theorizing, which excites only the
hard-core fringe, what canards will the anti-Obama campaign exploit?
Several themes have undergone pretesting in recent days, with mixed
results. Evangelical leader James Dobson has suggested that Obama is
deliberately distorting the meaning of the Bible, which is an unsubtle
method of questioning the Democratic candidate’s Christian commitment
and raising fears (again) that he is really a Muslim. “I think he’s
deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to
fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” said Mr. Dobson on
his popular radio broadcast, adding that Obama “is dragging
biblical understanding through the gutter.” Describing Mr. Obama’s interpretation of the Constitution, he used the word “fruit
cake,” a term that must be very familiar to him.
Meanwhile Floyd Brown, a right-wing huckster and unabashed promoter of racial fear dating back to the notorious Willie Horton ad of 1988, is back pushing the Muslim theme against Obama. This, too, is an obvious attempt to inflame anxieties over race and ethnicity. For too many Americans, Muslim wrongly means foreign and nonwhite.
And this week the world heard again
from Rove, who raised the old “elitist” trope against Obama, much as
the Republicans used envy and resentment against Kerry for his wealth
and status. “Even if you never met him, you know this guy,” sneered
Rove during a breakfast at the Capitol Hill Club. “He’s the guy at the
country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette
that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone
who passes by.” Insecure and pathetic as that makes Rove sound, he
surely knows how to provoke envy and resentment among voters,
especially white males. That was one of the most important messages
used by the Republicans against Kerry in 2004 with the famous
windsurfing ad.
So perhaps Obama will be portrayed as a Muslim
Marxist who hangs out at the country club, sipping cocktails and sneering at the common folk. The true message in that kind of crude,
contradictory propaganda is utter contempt for the target audience—in
other words, for you.
©2008 Creators Syndicate Inc. What’s your take? Write: editor@shepex.com or comment on this story online at www.expressmilwaukee.com.
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