Posted on 06/13/2008 3:35:09 PM PDT by Shermy
As long as there have been rumors in politics, there has been one widely accepted way for a candidate to deal with them. Basically, it's not to. Otherwise, according to prevailing wisdom, all a candidate achieves is to elevate the rumors to a legitimate story for the media to feast on. That don't-go-there approach was Barack Obama's plan for months until, on the candidate's first full day of campaigning as his party's presumed presidential nominee, a reporter from McClatchy Newspapers who was traveling aboard his plane asked him about a particularly toxic bit of hearsay that was zooming around the Internet about his wife Michelle. Obama lost his cool. "We have seen this before. There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it," Obama said, bristling. "That gives legs to the story. If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody has said something inappropriate, let them do it."
That night, in a conference call, Obama told his top aides it was time for a more aggressive solution to the rumors that have been popping up on the Internet about him and his family for months. And so the Obama campaign has built what might best be described as a Web-based rumor clearinghouse, located at fightthesmears.com, in which it hopes all the shady stories about Obama's faith, his family and his rumored connections with controversial figures can go to die.
Obama is enlisting his millions of supporters help him hunt down and quash these stories, just as those supporters helped him turn his insurgent campaign into a history-making juggernaut. Says Obama adviser Anita Dunn: "We will not allow Michelle or, for that matter, Barack to be defined by rumors."
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Has the candidate Barak Obama openly denounced the positions of the supposedly-fictional version? Or has he been careful to avoid doing that? If the "fictitious" version's positions aren't shared by the candidate, the candidate should be able to contradict them point by point. Of course, I suspect that candidate Obama's positions are a lot closer to the "fictional" version than he'd like to let on.
You know that Obamatrolls scour FR and other sites to keep up on the rumors so they can discount them on their own site. Good grief, he needs a whole website to explain away negative rumors?
The problem is, the people who were going to vote for him will do it regardless of rumors because they think he can do no wrong. And the people who weren't going to vote for him are not doing so because of rumors, but because of the facts of his Marxist leanings, his history and his associations. Who needs rumors when you have the truth?
This “pencil neck geek” (credit to Fred Blasse) Obama cannot weather the
strain of the campaign trail.
(1.) Obama's dad was not married to Obama-Mommie, Couldn't be. He was already very married in Kenya. When Obama-Mommie (a commie) found out, she sent the spousal-battering, drunken, polygamist Harvard Ph.D. and fellow commie, packing. Back in dear olde Kenya, he married several more wives.
(2.) Obama's best friends, mentors, and financial supporters in Chicago were, and are Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn.
(3.) Obama is on the board of ACORN, a rad-left urban-guerilla-politics outfit.
(4.) Mama Obama thinks white people are just all-around bad news.
(5.) Ah youse guys'll never believe this one, but here goes Barack Hussein Obama is just another Chicago sleazeball race-pimp, crooked politician. Nice smile, though, and handles the Teleprompter well.
(6.) The man who best understands what is going on with the Obama craze is young Ford, the wannabe big shot from Tennessee. But he simply can't understand why it is not he up there being lathered with the adulation of the sheeple. Life is unfair. He's just as big a crook, better looking, and a much better speaker!
I heard a rumor that Obama went to Koran classes in Indonsesia and was a Muslim when young....
Refute that you kool aid drinkers
But you’ve missed, to use a quaint phrase from the last century, a paradigm shift, that renders all facts concerning Obama, moot.
The rhetoric is what counts, and the public image of having Obama as President of the USA.
On a more serious note, nothing will matter as as long s gas stays up.
But the Saudis are announcing production increases, and speculators may get burnt. A most promising sign, not only for our wallets.
Including the "fight rumors" links ... On the Pepsi site that link is in the lower left corner.
Obama is a brand and his campaign has borrowed Pepsi's website to market him to America.
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