The Coming Attack on Barack

They will try to Swift Boat me,” said Barack Obama in the days before the New Hampshire primary, looking forward to the Democratic nomination that he still believes will be his, with a prediction both accurate and chilling. Whether he can go on to claim the nomination is yet to be determined. Much more predictable is the nature of the campaign that would be waged against him—and the fickleness of the national press corps if and when that ugly process eventually reaches its nadir.

The effective template for attacking a Democratic nominee was developed by former Republican political boss Karl Rove during decades of trench warfare in Texas and across the country. While Rove may only whisper advice from the sidelines next fall, his approach can be easily copied by lesser talents: Seize upon the Democrat’s most attractive quality and sow doubts to undermine that appeal. With candidates such as John Kerry and Max Cleland, that meant tearing down their records as war heroes and raising questions about their patriotism.

With Obama, the obvious target is his inspirational life story. The task of the opposition operatives will be to twist that saga, to unearth facts or factoids that raise concerns about the candidate’s background, and to make his cosmopolitan upbringing appear alien and even sinister—and of course, to play the race card against him, either subtly or blatantly. These themes will begin to appear in the right-wing press, which is of course where the original Swift Boat smears first showed up four years ago.