Clarence Page: Obama Vs. The Lunatic Fringe.

Obama vs. the lunatic fringe
Clarence Page

So you think the chorus of white hate groups is seething with rage that Barack Obama could become president? Think again.

Members of the knuckle-dragging set are taking a rosier view, judging by their Internet posts. They say the possibility of a biracial president is helping their recruitment efforts.

"It will be a beautiful day when the masses look at the paper and truly realize they have lost their own country," according to one of the postings spotted by Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"White people aren't going to do a thing until their toys are taken away from them," says another. "So things have to be worse for things to be better."

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So much for the question of whether Obama will be able to reach beyond his core liberal constituency.

Even former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has taken time from his international network of Holocaust-deniers to blog: "Obama is a visual aid for white Americans who just don't get it yet that we have lost control of our country, and unless we get it back we are heading for complete annihilation as a people."

Mercy. Can't we all get along?

Of course, these alleged hater-supporters might be expressing odd support for Obama in order to avoid receiving visits by the Secret Service.

Either way, their rhetoric is rife with pitiful themes of anger, fear and resentment—the three basic food groups of paranoid movements.

Obama has a bigger immediate headache than Duke and his allied dimwits. It's the rising chorus of anti-Obama attack books that don't always let truth get in the way of a good hatchet job.

Leading the pack is "Obama Nation" by Jerome R. Corsi. It leads the New York Times best-seller list, helped along by bulk orders from conservative book clubs and other arenas of the right-wing echo chamber.

Corsi does not hide his agenda. His inaccurate portrayal of Obama as a closet Muslim and black activist drug-user is intended to do what his earlier hit-job book, "Unfit for Command," did to Sen. John Kerry in 2004 when he was the Democratic presidential nominee.

Corsi claims he's not a hater, but says he's known to make hateful statements. He has called Islam "a worthless, dangerous satanic religion." He also has observed that "boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is OK with the pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press."

And "Obama Nation" is peppered unapologetically with innuendo, distortions and outright lies. It also has lots of double-meaning statements like, "The sexual attraction of his mother to her African husband jumps out from the page."

For fairness and balance, check out the liberal Media Matters for America Web site or Obama's own 40-page rebuttal to the "bigoted fringe" on his campaign's new Web site, "Unfit for Publication."

Kerry failed to respond to "Unfit for Command" for more than two weeks, or to the attack ads that followed. Obama's team responded within 24 hours of a Page 1 New York Times story about "Obama Nation."

Who knows how much good it will do? People who want to believe Obama is Muslim or some other deception are hardly going to let something so inconsequential as truth get in the way. Still, Obama has to respond and put his faith in the voters to be discerning. That doesn't offer much consolation, but it's what elections are really all about.

What do the hate groups and attack books have in common? A running theme of paranoia—fears that go beyond a rational basis.

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," wrote historian Richard J. Hofstadter in the beginning of his now-classic 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

"I call it the paranoid style," he wrote, "simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind."

Forty-four years later, Hofstadter's political "arena" looks more than ever like a mud-wrestling pit.

News that the Bureau of the Census predicts non-Hispanic white Americans will become a minority in the nation's population by 2050, earlier than previously expected, adds fuel to those who fear diversity.

Yet, California's population, to cite one example, has been minority non-Hispanic white since the late 1990s and the state has hardly fallen into the sea. Despite occasional conflicts, Americans are remarkably versatile at assimilating newcomers who are willing to work hard.

The prospect that Obama might prove the durability of that American dream excites many Americans and irritates others. An Obama victory would show that America is not as racist as many black extremists believe it to be or as many white extremists wish it were.

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

Editor's comment: This book at first blush sounds like "FILTH" to me, though for now I'll reserve judgment until I know more beyond it's author's stated SELF SERVING goal:

"One of the reasons I wrote this book is to keep Obama from getting elected."