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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 […]

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.

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