[osint] Rumor mill keeps Obama on defense

http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20080514/NATION/513535543/1002

Rumor mill keeps Obama on defense

May 14, 2008

By Christina Bellantoni - Sen. Barack Obama says he is
well-prepared to battle false smears and Republican attacks on his religion
and patriotism, but various rumors have permeated so deeply into the
electorate that they present a general election challenge for the likely
Democratic presidential nominee.

From state to state, voters who support Mr. Obama’s rivals regularly cite
information gleaned from e-mails that falsely claim that he is a Muslim or
that he doesn’t respect the Pledge of Allegiance.

"His name scares me, his background scares me," said Terri Knowles, a
grandmother from Tippecanoe County, Ind. She voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton last week and said that if Mr. Obama wins the nomination, she will
sit out the November election.

This week in West Virginia, the rumor mill was working at full tilt,
flagging the work the Obama campaign faces to set the record straight before
November and highlighting the hurdles of urban-myth attacks on candidates.

Mr. Obama - who is Christian and says the Pledge of Allegiance regularly -
sometimes shrugs off questions about the rumors with jokes, but he
increasingly has been forced to quash them outright. He said the e-mails
have been "systematically fed into the bloodstream" before a state holds an
election, indicating that "it is not just a random sort of viral thing."

"This is a dirty trick that folks are playing on voters," he said.

Missouri voters were receiving the e-mails before the Feb. 5 primary. One
contained the false rumor about Mr. Obama’s faith and erroneously claimed he
was not sworn into office on the Bible.

"Do you want this man leading our country?" the e-mail asks. "If you do not
ever forward anything else, please forward this to all your contacts."

In Pennsylvania, Republican Margaret Miller of Newmanstown told Mr. Obama in
a diner that she "had to ask" about the rumor: "I’m going to ask you why you
didn’t salute the flag."

He explained, "We were singing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and the flag
wasn’t in front of me, the flag was behind me." He added that he was looking
at the singer and that he always honors the flag.

Earlier this month during a town hall at the fairgrounds in South Bend,
Ind., a man asked the Democrat: "I’ve been reading on the Internet that you
believe as an American we should not have to pledge allegiance to the flag.
Is that true?"

Mr. Obama dismissed the e-mail as "a smear campaign that they’ve been
running since the beginning of the campaign" and noted that he says the
Pledge when presiding in the U.S. Senate.

"You can catch it on videotape," he said. "I’ve been saying the Pledge since
I was 3 years old. Don’t believe that stuff."

Before closing his 50-second answer to a question that voters have had in
each state, he chuckled and added a new line: "If you ever get these letters
from Nigeria saying that they’ve got a lot of money for you, don’t give ‘em
your bank account number."

The answer earned him laughter, but it’s the people who don’t get a chance
to hear his explanation that he will have to reach if he wants to win them
over in a general election against presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John
McCain.

Marjorie Hershey, a political science professor at Indiana University in
Bloomington, said the e-mails that also flooded her state before the primary
are "damaging" because there is a "lack of information about Obama."

"It has worried a number of people," she said, also theorizing that although
the e-mails may originate from "right-wing" groups aiming to defeat Mr.
Obama, it is difficult to estimate their spread because they are forwarded
through the limitless boundaries of the Internet.

Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee, said he lost his race against
President Bush in part because he wasn’t able to respond quickly to the
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. He said he isn’t worried about Mr. Obama.

"You have to be responding with the truth in the same amount, if not more,
and that is something Barack has already done effectively," Mr. Kerry told
reporters last week, adding that Mr. Obama has "beat back" the "Internet
rumors."

Aware of the challenge, Mr. Obama now mentions his grandfather’s service in
the Army under Gen. George S. Patton during World War II in nearly every
campaign stop. He also outlines his family’s Kansas roots and his
father-in-law’s working-class struggle before ending his speeches by saying,
"God bless America."

When talking about the need for a new GI Bill of Rights and taking care of
Americans, Mr. Obama says his candidacy "all traces back to the values that
my grandparents passed on to me."

In a speech to North Carolina Democrats recently, he mocked the rumors and
the dust-up over his former pastor’s anti-American sermons as distractions.

"I notice that over the last couple of weeks there’s bee

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