Starting To Get It
Give Nick Kristof credit–he is one of the few, after “otherizing” Obama for months and months, to acknowledge in any way that his paeans to Obama’s background and international connections may have contributed materially to the propagation of politically damaging nonsense about the candidate. As the last Pew survey finds that 13% overall believe Obama to be a Muslim and another 16% can’t say for sure what his religion is, it may have started sinking in that pro-Obama writers talking up his exotic roots and insisting how much Muslims around the world will like him have been undermining him on a regular basis. The inability, or perhaps refusal, of vast numbers of people to be able to identify a simple, well-known fact about a major presidential candidate would have existed anyway, since there are always going to be ignorant and gullible people, but it is undeniable that it has been stoked and encouraged unintentionally by every article and column expressing delight at Obama’s international and cross-cultural ties, which seem so marvelous to his admirers and which seem equally menacing or undesirable to many others. These admirers were the same people who thought it was a good thing politically that Obama went to Europe to be cheered by a multitude of foreigners, but who were also plainly baffled by the enthusiastic reception of Palin by multitudes of Americans.
Even last fall, long before most people knew much about Obama, the culture war divisions that have since reemerged with such ferocity were already present in the praise heaped on Obama for his mixed background, his father born in Kenya and his relatives scattered around the globe, since these things could have appeared so praiseworthy only to the people who also find Palin some bizarre backwoods absurdity. The fetishization of the exotic Obama by Obama supporters mirrors in many respects the fetishization of the normal Palin by her supporters, because for the former it has been Obama’s differences from the typical American experience that have drawn their interest and enthusiasm while Palin’s fans are excited by how much like them she seems to be.
Daily Show jokes that presuppose the audience already understands that Obama is not actually a Muslim and a New Yorker cover whose creators take for granted that no one could look at that image and take it seriously have all fed into rumors and false claims about Obama. The sophisticated response after that New Yorker cover came out was that everyone understood satire and grasped that it was a criticism of absurd rumor-mongering, and sophisticates wagged their fingers at those who thought that there would be anyone who didn’t have the same ironic sensibility. They never considered that there were large swathes of the population that didn’t want to see it as satire, or who were so poorly informed about Obama’s background that it would not take much misinformation to harden their opinion against him forever.
On a final note, I would add that Kristof gets one thing very wrong:
Someday people will look back at the innuendoes about Mr. Obama with the same disgust with which we regard the smears of Al Smith as a Catholic candidate in 1928.
There is a crucial difference here that ought to merit much greater disgust now and in the future about the rumors used against Obama, since the far-fetched anti-Catholic conspiracy theories woven about Smith’s candidacy, while wrong and absurd, were at least based in the reality that Smith was a Catholic. Were Obama actually a Muslim, one might imagine seeing the propagation of far worse rumors, but because he plainly is not one and we all know how much resistance there is to a Muslim candidate for President the campaign to portray him as one is on an entirely different level. To the extent that his admirers never really appreciated how damaging being identified as a Muslim would be politically, and to the extent that they refused to accept that an overwhelming majority of the public was going to reject a candidate they perceived to be a Muslim, they share in the responsibility for driving up these numbers who are confused about Obama’s religion. Their writing about Obama has given some shred of plausibility to the rumors by advancing idea that Obama might serve as a bridge between the West and Muslims around the world, which always implied that he shared something with Muslims in some way that was more than incidental. Unless you already knew Obama’s story backwards and forwards, these overblown, largely baseless claims about Obama’s rift-healing powers “otherized” Obama before wide audiences.
This doesn’t make any sense. To believe that Obama is a Muslim would require a) a total lack of contact with any media coverage of the man, coverage which has clearly portrayed him as Christian, or b) a hatred so strong of him that people are willing to suspend rationality and look for hidden meanings in birth certificates, old school records, and speeches to find “proof” of his Muslim faith.
In neither case does playing down his international ties help dissuade people from thinking that he is a Muslim – because the first group won’t see the coverage, and the second won’t believe it no matter how factual.
Besides, since when did it become the media’s job to pander to the ignorant minority by playing down the positive characteristics of a candidate?
I’m skeptical about the premise of this article. I think the only folks who still think that Obama is a muslim are the people who are paying so little attention that their opinions are based upon little more than hunch or word of mouth, and a few others who are so devoted to fringe, right wing views that they refuse to absorb any evidence from other sources.
The only way that the writings of Obama admirers can have possibly shaped the opinions of either of the groups above is to have somehow contributed to the hunch/word-of-mouth atmospherics around this campaign. It’s possible, but I think the smear e-mails that circulated (are circulating?) for months probably had a lot more do with it. That, and the simple reality of the name Barack Hussein Obama.
In short, you’ve got to have virtually no information or a willful disregard for information to be so clueless, and liberal writers are irrelevant to either position.
I’m not sure what the solution is here. Should Obama supporters pretend that he is not a black man, that he didn’t have a Kenyan father, that he doesn’t represent a change of identity with our past? It’s certainly true that the positive of Obama’s background have a negative spin as well, but pretending there’s no “there” there is absurd. People who come to irrational conclusions about Obama’s religion are simply demonstrating their dislike of his personal identity and the implications of his Presidency through a form of cognitive dissonance. If the cognitive dissonance comes to an end, it doesn’t mean they are going to suddenly like Obama. They are just going to outright dislike him, without feeling some need to invent reasons for it. If Obama didn’t represent a change in this respect, there would be no controversy about whether people like this change or not. But there is, because he does represent, at least in symbolic form, a change from our past, both in identity and character. This simply can’t be denied, and you can’t blame Obama’s supporters for not properly hiding these matters in the closet.
I have to agree with Corey and rayrick. Perhaps the progressive-side pushing of Obama’s “worldliness” is having some kind of penumbra effect, but all the GOP/conservative types I know are far more likely to cite right-wing BS memes about Obama = Muslim. I haven’t heard one talk about how Dems say it’s great his dad was a Muslim or that he lived overseas or anything like that. All that’s anecdotal, I admit, but as far as I can ell, any “problem” with Obama’s background is being generated and pushed exclusively on the right.
These rumors are rooted in an important reality: he has a foreign-sounding name and purposely changed it to that (from Barry) after carousing with all kinds of freaks, Pakistanis, and Muslims in college. He’s alienated, and we all sense it. It’s represented not least by his church, his associations with Bill Ayers, and his stupid last name. If he were not so alienated, and his name were Barry, then he’d not be in so much trouble. The prejudice against foreigners running our country is a healthy one, even if in this sense the folk wisdom is based on various demonstrable falsehoods. It’s little different than the Black Helicopters mythology of the 90s; it’s rooted in a fear of the Other, which is something conservatives should view with delight.
Let me see if I understand your theory here. You are suggesting that there is a large group of people (large enough to be electorally significant) who (1) read Kristof’s column often enough to have been exposed to columns about Obama’s otherness and (2) are so ignorant that they believe Obama is a muslim while (3) being unlikely to believe that Obama is a muslim in the absence of such columns. Is that right? Do you have any evidence to support this theory? Or is this just a pretty story that sounds good?