Bumpy ride on way to White House

Bumpy ride on way to White House
By Clarence Page
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published January 24, 2007

WASHINGTON -- "A lie can travel halfway around the world," Mark Twain is said to have exclaimed, "while the truth is putting on its shoes." What an optimist he was. In this age of the Internet, lies go around the globe many times before the truth can even find its shoes.

Just ask Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Just as Illinois' rising superstar senator announced his White House bid, an anti-Obama smear campaign was percolating in cyberspace and popping up in countless e-mail boxes, including mine.

And by the time Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) announced her presidential bid Saturday, the Obama rumor had taken on new legs in the mainstream media, thanks to an unfounded accusation linking the rumor to "the Hillary Clinton camp."

The Web site of the conservative magazine Insight alleged that Democrats "connected" to the New York senator had discovered that Obama had studied at a madrassa, a Muslim religious school, for four years while living in Indonesia as a kid and doesn't want anyone to know about it.

Besides its incendiary implications of anti-Muslim paranoia, the allegation of an Obama coverup and the Clinton outing is simply wrong, wrong and wrong.

First, Obama was not secretly educated in a radical Islamic school when he was growing up in Indonesia. That was confirmed Monday by CNN senior international correspondent John Vause, reporting from Jakarta. With pictures and interviews that include one of young "Barry" (his childhood nickname) Obama's classmates, Vause found that the Besuki School is not and never was a madrassa. It is a secular public school attended mostly by Muslims.

That's not surprising, since Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country. Yet, about a fourth of the school's enrollment was non-Muslim, like young Barry, as it is now. Children and teachers wear conventional Western dress, not Eastern religious garb, and theology is found only in a weekly class on comparative religions.

Insight also said Obama's political rivals "are seeking to prove" that the school promoted Wahhabism, an austere form of Islam that fuels many Islamic terrorists. But Vause observed on CNN that "I've been to those madrassas in Pakistan ... this school is nothing like that."

Yet, no matter how many facts you dig up, truth has a tough time standing up to a juicy rumor. By the time CNN debunked the unfounded allegations, they had been repeated on Fox News, The New York Post, the Glenn Beck program on CNN Headline News and other outlets. To hear some of the chatter, you would have thought that Clinton's campaign had all but outed Obama as an Al Qaeda agent.

Welcome to the big leagues, senators. Whisper campaigns are a sad reality of politics. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) knows. Vicious rumors that were traced back to the George W. Bush camp helped undo McCain's momentum in South Carolina's critical Republican primary campaign in 2000.

The Internet only deepens the targeted candidate's dilemma: If you deny rumors that are just bubbling around cyberspace, that public denial makes them more newsworthy in the mainstream media. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) learned that in 2004 when his candid denials on Don Imus' radio show of rumored hanky-panky with a young female staffer ("There's nothing to it.") actually helped to spread the unfounded rumors. The rumor was not sufficiently newsworthy for The New York Times and others to report, but Kerry's response to it was.

But if politicians don't respond, they risk the corrosive effect that unanswered charges can have on their campaign. Kerry, again, offered an excellent example by failing to respond to attack ads by Swift Boat Veterans for more than two weeks.

And Hillary Clinton is no political patsy. Although quite a few Democrats sound nervous about her vulnerabilities, one of her strengths as a campaigner is her experience, along with her ex-president husband, at weathering political storms.

Obama's just beginning to learn. Worse is yet to come. If one can be condemned by faint praise, Obama should feel praised so far by faint condemnation. If empty rumors are the worst that his enemies can come up with in their desperate attempts to chip away at his amazingly pristine image, he's doing remarkably well. But, fasten your seat belt, Senator. It's going to be a bumpy ride, to paraphrase Bette Davis in "All About Eve."

And with this much mudslinging a year before the first primary and caucus votes are cast, this presidential contest will be a big test not only for the candidates, but also for the rest of us.

There's a lot of speculation going on about whether we Americans are ready to elect a black or a female president. The real question is whether we are ready to be fair to all candidates, despite the spin doctors, mudslingers and rumormongers who betray our hopes and play on our fears.

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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com