FT244

The Internet has become a major force in American elections. Political parties use it to contact supporters, raise money, organise, and communicate with voters. And in the recent presidential election, the Republicans used the Net to spread disinformation – conspiracy theories – about Barack and Michelle Obama. (I should point out that I’m not being partisan here, although if the Democrats tried anything similar on the Republican candidate John McCain, I have yet to come across it).

The strategy appeared to be to make the Obamas seem strange, ‘other’ – even actually dangerous. Since Obama was a black man with an Arab middle name (Huss­ein), and a former law professor to boot, generating smears about the Obamas wasn’t hard. The obvious one appears to have been the most successful: as Obama’s absentee father was a Muslim, “Obama is a secret Muslim” became a staple of millions of automated phone-calls and emails. It was all over the Republican blogosphere – a million-plus hits on Google for ‘Obama is a Muslim’– and eventually made its way into the major media, though mostly in the form of denials from the Democratic camp. In mid-October, polling by the University of Texas found that a quarter of the voters of Texas believed that Obama was a Muslim.

As a secondary theme, there was an attempt to prove that Obama’s birth certifi­cate (above) was a fake. Never mind that the Hawaiian authorities released copies of the original. (So it must have been planted in Hawaii, right?) On one website (http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com) there is some astonishingly detailed forensic analyses of the certificate attempting to prove that it’s a fake, and 760,000 Google hits as a whole for “Obama + birth certificate”.

There was also a much less serious attempt to show that Obama’s father was not the absentee Muslim of the official stories but another man (a Communist, no less) and that his grandfather was a cocaine dealer. 1  These came very late in the campaign, at a point when the Democrats were well in the lead; these smears sounded desperate and unconvincing and didn’t receive much attention.

The story which proved to have the longest ‘legs’ was the “Obama-was-friends-with-a-terrorist” theme. The link was William Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground, a group which made the eccentric decision to take on the US state in an armed struggle back in the days of the Vietnam War. [2]  Now a pro­fessor in Chicago (as was Obama, before going into politics), Ayers served on a charitable board with Obama and had donated 0 to a campaign fund of his. This connection was first given to the Daily Mail’s Peter Hitchens in February and imported back into the Repub­lican media operation. [3]  During the campaign, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was used to run the Obama-terrorist story in public appearances.

A sub-theme of the friend-of-a-terrorist story was the claim, backed up by apparently substantive analysis of writing styles, by “stylometric analysts” no less, that Obama didn’t write his highly praised 1996 memoir, Dreams From My Father, and that the real author was… former Weather Underground member, William Ayers. [4]

Obama’s wife, Michelle, like Barack a Harvard law graduate, was the subject of a sustained attempt to portray her as a black radical and secret Black Power supporter. A videotape existed, it was said – and even I got this one sent to me by email – of Michelle denouncing ‘whitey’ while on stage with black Muslim leader Louis Farrakan. After a couple of months circulating on the Net, the story surfaced at an Obama news conference. In replying, Obama described the technique being employed against him: “We have seen this before. There is dirt and lies that are circulated in emails and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, ask me about it… That gives legs to the story.”

This is the basic game: the existence of the chatter on the Net means it is a story: either on the basis that there is no smoke without fire, or simply that “there’s a lot of smoke”. And these days – with the help of the Internet – generating enough smoke is easier than ever before.

They tried it all: friend of a terrorist, Muslim, fraud (fake birth certificate, fake book, fake father), married to a white-hating black woman.

And, in the end, none of it worked – at any rate not enough to stop Obama being elected. In an ordinary year, perhaps it might have done; but the Republicans were campaigning in the midst of an economic crisis mostly of their own creation. It says something striking that even in these conditions the Republicans came as close as they did, receiving 46 per cent of the vote.

NOTES
1 These are discussed at http://tinyurl.com/5etfaa.

2 A very good recent history of the Weather Underground is Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America (AK Press, 2006).

3 http://tinyurl.com/69fmsu.

4 See for example: “Experts affirm: Ayers wrote Obama’s memoir”, http://tinyurl.com/63767x.