NEWSWEEK: "Obama's Pesky 'Muslim' Problem" [View All]

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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 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 suspect that swing voters worried about terrorism 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.

http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/02/11/obama-s-pesky-muslim-problem.aspx