Reading Between the Smears, or the Sad, Slow, National Progress Toward Justice

Written by: Kate Drazner on Sep 14, 2008 8:50 PM EDT

Nine weeks until the election, and still, the Obama camp is experiencing the "M" tag as the hardest to shake. It's the most simply misunderstood fact about Barack Obama, the easiest to debunk, and yet many anti-Obamans cling to it like their lives were dependent on it.

This is partly due to the fact that saying Barack Obama is a Muslim is just a euphemism for thinking something even worse.

Reports Christopher Dickey of Newsweek:

Yet even a third cousin of mine in the mountains of North Carolina, an independent-minded Democrat who voted for Gore in 2000 and Bush in 2004, said he can't bring himself to vote for Obama, either. Why? "Because I believe he is a Muslim," said my cousin. Not so, I said. He was raised a Christian and is a practicing Christian. My cousin shook his head. "I just don't believe him," he said...Dent Myers, a relic collector and self-caricaturing bigot in Kennesaw, Ga., north of Atlanta...argues that when Southerners criticize Obama, "They say, 'He's a Muslim, he's a mulatto Muslim, or quadroon Muslim ... [only because] they don't want to use the old N word."

Sure, we can look at the Muslim smear (which, I argue, shouldn't even be a smear in and of itself), we could attribute it to the aptitude of the American people to 'buy' their information at face value just like they're buying clothes, cars and fitness regimes (such is the ever-expanding empire of market-based capitalism); this would also explain why the McCain smear ads, as outrageous as we find them, seem to be working. But, perhaps, the Muslim excuse is just a band-aid for the shamefulness of the fact that many Americans simply don't want to put an African-American man in the White House.

Explains Marty Kaplan:

This argument -- called "the Bradley effect," after the Election Day disappearance of the lead that Los Angeles' African-American mayor, Tom Bradley, had held until then in the gubernatorial campaign -- says that the percentages that black candidates get in polls should be discounted by the reluctance of no small number of white voters to admit that race is a factor in their choice.

As far as we would like to believe we've progressed as a nation, it saddens me to no end to see retroactive attitudes in the subtexts of anti-Obama rhetoric (which, I may add, is completely embodied if not emboldened by the McCain campaign). The "do-we-really-know-Barack-Obama?" messages, the "Barack-Obama-disrespected-poor-white-woman-Sarah-Palin" messages, the "Was-Obama-really-born-in-this-country" myths, these messages send subtextual signals that:

1.) Barack Obama cannot be trusted, and is to be feared
2.) Barack Obama is irreverent, and should be put in his place
3.) Barack Obama is un-American
How sad that these messages hearken back to the pre-civil rights era, and how sad that America has lost its sensitivities to such repugnant attitudes.

The simple truth is, there is ample evidence that McCain is a war-loving, volatile-tempered, anti-feminist, hot-headed conservative who may desire to see the U.S. in a never-ending state of war, while our economy (something he has professed not to know much about) crumbles here at home. Barack Obama has proven to be an even-tempered, throughtful, analytical and humble public servant. And yet the McCain campaign has fear-mongered it's way back to the 50s and told its base to fear him. And these latent retro attitudes may be the hardest thing we have to fight against.

So what can we do? I didn't mean for this post to come off as defeatist, because I believe now that we know the nature of the beast, we can fight back. We should be talking to our comrades across the ideological divide; ask them why they believe what they believe about Barack Obama, tell them the facts, don't let them off the hook, and, as uncomfortable as it may be, expose the latent attitudes beneath their anti-Obama rationale. It's possible that the majority of those conversations may not end in a revelation of sorts, but we can at least hope that between now and election time, part of America may start to reexamine their fears about the Democratic nominee.

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