Editorials

In phone calls, e-mails and personal visits to The Star’s newsroom, evidence of the political silly season abounds. The local delivery is almost as smooth as the original sources of the smears against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Those sources being McCain-Palin campaign rallies, Fox News, talk radio and murkily sourced e-mails.

Pick up a newsroom phone in recent weeks and there’s a good chance the caller on the other end will unburden himself of a list of complaints against Illinois’ junior senator.

To wit: How can any American vote for Barack Hussein Obama, a man who has associated with America-haters, radicals and (gasp!) liberals? He must be a Muslim. His name makes him sound like a terrorist. He hangs out with terrorists. He probably is a terrorist, secretly plotting to drive the good, ol’ U.S. of A. out of existence.

And on it goes.

Really, it’s nothing new. The right wing has long specialized in running campaigns that paint their rivals as less than the Republican ideal of an American.

The 2008 presidential race presents a different landscape. Obama, a black man who is the product of a marriage between a white woman and black man, was liable to attract the ire of the less racially enlightened. Throw in a name that lands with a thud upon the ears of those already predisposed to dislike any Democrat, and you’ve got trouble.

Of course, the smears are exaggerations, if not outright deceptions.

In one telling, Obama spent decades in a Christian church ruled by a radical preacher. In another, he’s a Muslim. Ask yourself, how many Muslims spend their Sundays in a Christian church?

A second rallying point against Obama is his associations with a former ’60s radical named William Ayers, a man connected with acts of violence against the United States several decades ago. While Obama has spent time on a nonprofit board with Ayers and has several other loose connections, it’s hard to fathom the twisted circles that somehow tie a presidential candidate to Ayers, a former radical who despite his past was honored as the 1997 Chicago Citizen of the Year.

Dirty tricks, whisper campaigns and guilt-by-association tactics have always had a place in American politics. Usually this sort of nastiness has been operated in dark basements by unseemly characters who rarely see the light of day.

This campaign season the spigot has opened a little wider. Last Sunday, Fox News played host for an hour to a notorious anti-Semite with crackpot theories about Obama. At rallies — though thankfully not at Tuesday’s debate — McCain’s campaign has rolled out a message for its followers: Barack Hussein Obama is less than a true American.

The jaded Washington pundits who have seen it all explain that McCain-Palin is a ticket in trouble; the polls are heading in the wrong direction for the GOP this political season. With little else in their favor, McCain and Sarah Palin are forced to tell you who they are against, instead of what they are for.

The translation is that this is a temporary detour from politics as usual — where candidates, including Obama, employ half-truths about their foes’ policies, but not their personal lives. The ugliness will pass.

If so, we can’t get past the election soon enough. Come January 2009, one of these candidates — either the smeared or the smearer — has to govern the nation in troubled times. If McCain is elected he will have shown he was willing to frolic in the gutter in order to win the presidency. If Obama wins, perhaps as much as one-third of the nation or more will believe their new president unworthy of U.S. citizenship, much less the Oval Office.