Dirt begins to fly at Obama

[Wretched Excess]

Dirt begins to fly at Obama
War opens with hints about ‘suspect’ backers

WHEN Hillary Clinton warned that Barack Obama had not been thoroughly “vetted”, as she has been, she was hinting darkly at trouble to come over her rival’s radical pastor and shady patron in Chicago, the Illinois senator’s home town.

Clinton is convinced that her opponent will be eviscerated by the Republican attack machine should he win the Democratic presidential nomination. That, at any rate, is her camp’s excuse for doing everything it can to discredit him behind the scenes. The battle to tear down Obama and his claim to represent “hope” has begun.

His momentous victory in Iowa and his humbling in New Hampshire have launched a war of attrition between the two camps.

At enormous rallies, Obama’s new slogan, “Yes, we can”, is rekindling the fervour of his supporters in defiance of Clinton’s accusation that he peddles false hopes.

The same determined message was whispered by slaves and abolitionists and was proclaimed by Martin Luther King, who “took us to a mountaintop”, Obama said to cheers in the formerly segregated city of Charleston, South Carolina, last week.

There, in a boost for his campaign, Obama was introduced by John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. Kerry vowed that Democrats would never again allow themselves to be “swiftboated”, a reference to the Vietnam war veterans who impugned his war record. But for Obama it has already begun.

“Swiftboating” has become a metaphor for attacking a candidate’s strengths head-on, instead of their weaknesses. In Obama’s case, it means calling into question his multilayered racial and religious background and his reputation for scrupulous integrity. The smear that Obama is secretly a Muslim, or too close for comfort to that religion, has already taken hold among some voters.

“We have to peel back his identity,” said one elderly white voter in South Carolina, a state Obama must win on January 26. “Did you know his middle name is Hussein? He is a Muslim and was raised in an Islamic school.”

In fact, Obama was not brought up to follow any religion, although his African grandfather and Indonesian stepfather were Muslim. He became a Christian as a community organiser in Chicago and in the late 1980s joined the Trinity United Church of Christ, an African-American mega-church with an 8,000-strong congregation.

The same southern voter, who did not wish to be named, then threw another piece of Obama’s biography into the frame. “I looked at his church’s website. It said it was ‘unashamedly black’. They don’t want any whites there. I wouldn’t feel real comfortable if I tried to worship there.”

The unorthodox pastor of Trinity church is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who is refusing all interviews. He married Barack and Michelle Obama and baptised their two daughters. He is already attracting attention on right-wing websites for describing the September 11 attacks as a “wake-up call” to America for ignoring the concerns of “people of colour”, and for claiming that Americans “believe in white supremacy and black inferiority . . . more than we believe in God”.

Wright travelled to meet Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, in the 1980s with Louis Farrakhan, the black supremacist leader of the Nation of Islam, and subscribes to the “Black Values System”, which preaches self-reliance but claims “middle-classness” is ensnaring blacks.

“When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit Colonel Gadaffi with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell,” Wright once said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3177684.ece

more at the link.

interesting stuff from the british press (of course).  I stumbled across this at DU, of all places.