All of these factors and more are now coming into play as the 2008 race for the White House rounds the turn and heads for the finish line.
Double Whammy - Religion, Sex and Other Prejudices
John McCain and George Bush were the leading candidates for the Republican nomination in the 2000 presidential primary, and McCain won New Hampshire by a wide margin making the South Carolina primary a must-win situation for Bush. Karl Rove, Bush’s political advisor and in-house "evil genius," immediately organized a campaign of nasty tactics that included spreading rumors that McCain had infected his "mob-connected wife with a venereal disease."
Thousands of South Carolina voters began to receive telephone calls in a "push poll" pioneered by Rove in which voters were asked if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an "illegitimate black child." Bush won the primary with 53 to 42 percent of the vote.
Earlier this year, McCain stated that he has "always respected Karl Rove as one of the smart great political minds I think in American politics." McCain not only refused to condemn Rove's vicious campaign tactics, he has now come to rely on Rove’s advice.
Moreover, McCain has employed Steve Schmidt, Bush’s Rove-trained attack dog as a senior advisor and has given Schmidt equal status with his campaign manager, Rick Davis. Schmidt’s specialty is the manipulation of the news media environment, and he’s responsible for the new attack ads.
McCain’s derailment of his Straight Talk Express and his deployment of the Rove attack machine are reminiscent of what happened to George Wallace in his attempts to become governor of Alabama.
In his first campaign in 1958, Wallace was backed by the NAACP and said if he didn’t have what it takes "to treat a man fair, regardless of his color, then I don’t have what it takes to be the governor of your great state." Following his defeat by John Patterson, an ardent racist, Wallace was heard to say, "I was out-niggered, and I will never be out-niggered again."
The open hatred for Obama expressed on some Internet sites is violent and includes identifying him as the Antichrist and calling for his assassination. One site proclaims, "Some say he has the characteristics of an Antichrist as described in the Bible," and a Google search using the terms "Obama" and "Antichrist" tracks 970,000 hits.
McCain recently aired a television ad called "The One" in which Obama is featured as a self-appointed messiah. Reflecting a belief by some fundamentalist Christians in the imminent arrival of the Antichrist and the Rapture as fictionalized in the best-selling Left Behind series of books, the advertisement uses virtually identical language. It begins with words flashing across the screen, "It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One." The allusion is inescapable.
Another falsehood being vigorously chain-mailed around the Internet by conservative activists is the assertion that Obama is a secret Islamist agent, and at least 13 percent of American voters now believe he is a practicing Muslim. Another 16 percent say they aren’t sure if he’s a Muslim or not, since they have heard "different things" about it.
A group called the Coalition Against Anti-Christian Rhetoric ran a television advertisement in South Dakota just before the primary showing Obama wearing a traditional native turban during an earlier visit to Kenya and edited to hear him saying, "we are no longer a Christian nation, we are also a Muslim nation."
The misleading ad eliminated the context: "Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation – at least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."
The proud creator of the original 1988 Willie Horton attack ad, Floyd Brown, has established an Internet website called the National Campaign Fund that accuses Obama of covering up his Muslim past.
An article in a magazine owned by the right-wing Washington Times ("dedicated to spreading the truth about God to the world") recently carried a story attributed to an unnamed source that Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school known as a "madrassa."
In truth, Obama was educated in a "Public Elementary School" in Indonesia which had no focus on religion and included students of all creeds. He also spent two years in a Catholic school in the same country, where the Muslim religion of his now deceased stepfather may have been entered on the records.
