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Newsweek - February 11, 2008
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 national-security swing voters out there who will be suspicious of someone who has ANY links to the Muslim world--as irrelevant as those links may be. I wish it wasn't true, but 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.
http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/02/11/obama-s-pesky-muslim-problem.aspx
CAIR – February 28, 2008
Ellison says Obama smears will fail
Rep. Keith Ellison has said that attempts to insinuate that Barack Obama is Muslim won't have any effect on the presidential candidate, arguing that Americans won't fall for such a "bigoted" appeal.
Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat and the first Muslim member of Congress, also said he has no doubt a Muslim could be elected president.
Rumors have circulated on the Internet for months that Obama, who is Christian, is Muslim, and the issue kicked up again this week with a photograph of him dressed in traditional local garments during a visit to Kenya.
The Drudge Report posted the photograph and said it was being circulated by "Clinton staffers," but Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has denied knowing anything about it.
Also, a radio talk show host warming up a crowd for GOP presidential candidate John McCain referred repeatedly to "Barack Hussein Obama" and called him a "hack, Chicago-style" politician. McCain denounced the comments.
"It's a deliberate attempt to associate him with things Islamic," Ellison said of the use of Obama's middle name.
"There has been a concerted effort to whip up fear, anxiety, bigotry against Obama based on his Muslim roots, but he is in fact a Christian, and on top of that, those people's efforts are going to fail," Ellison said. "And they won't fail because he's proven that he's really not a Muslim; they'll fail because Americans will come to the conclusion that the organizing principle of our nation is freedom of worship."
Obama's father and stepfather were Muslim, and he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, a largely Muslim country — but Obama was not raised Muslim.
"Assuming that the American public is bigoted, and infused with religious bigotry against Muslims, is incorrect," Ellison said.
And he insisted that a Muslim could become president.
"Look, we elected a Catholic," Ellison said. "Mitt Romney was a viable candidate in this race. I don't think that his decline had to do with him being Mormon." Romney, a GOP candidate, dropped out of the race earlier this year.
"So I think that certainly America could elect a Muslim president," he said. "America could elect a woman president. I think we probably are going to elect a black president. And we'll all be better for it."
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which fights anti-Muslim bigotry, said he agreed with Ellison.
"There clearly is a level of anti-Muslim attitude in our society, but I think it's still a minority," he said. "It's a vocal minority, but it's still a minority. The majority of Americans respect people of all faiths, and I think while taking faith into consideration, it would not be the main factor in their voting."
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