Dear Dr. Democrat:
I keep hearing references in the conservative media about Barack Obama’s alleged use of drugs, but I read his book, “Dreams of My Father,” and though it seemed his friends were getting caught up in drugs, he went another way, though he did admit to drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. What’s the truth? Is Obama just another black drug addict?
Scared Straight
Dear Scared:
Smells like swiftboating to me. I watch C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” every morning to get a sense of what’s burbling on right-wing radio without having to sully my ears by listening to it.
If the right-wing callers to C-SPAN this morning are a gauge, the new meme is Obama’s drug use. One caller read a passage from one of Obama’s books (supposedly) it which Obama said he was going to try heroin, but the hand of the junkie who was going to hit him up was shaking so bad he didn’t do it. Another caller asked if we shouldn’t be concerned that Obama was still addicted to coke. A few calls later, someone seconded the question about addiction. Another caller said she’d heard from a missionary in Africa that Obama was sending U.S. campaign donations to his cousin’s “tribe” in Kenya.
One indicator that it is a concerted effort (that this is a new theme being pounded by Rush Limbaugh, Neil Boortz and/or Sean Hannity) is that these callers were off topic. The topic was free speech, ironically, but in the “rules” of the show, you’re supposed to stick to the topic or the host will hang up on you, unless it’s an “open phones” segment, which is usually in the last half-hour.
A Democratic caller finally came on and presented a lot of what is known about Bush’s coke problem toward the end of the half-hour.
I haven’t read Obama’s books but two colleagues in my practice have, and neither of them remember a reference to heroin.
Just as John Kerry really did lead operations under fire and saved the life of one of his men, Al Gore never said he invented the Internet and the Clintons lost $100,000 on Whitewater at a time when Bill’s annual salary as governor was $35,000, reality is irrelevant to the racists, feeble-minded rednecks and Christian nationalists for whom the lies about Obama’s drug use and cousins in Kenya are directed.
There’s very little we can do about that. The damage is done at the margins, and only works in a tight race.
McCain is teetering on becoming Bob Dole Jr. But until we see signs that a landslide similar to ’96 — Clinton 49/Dole 41 — is in the offing, we have to assume the GOP will take all the red states Bush took in 2004. (My oft-stated theory is, where there are large concentrations of Republicans, you’ll find large concentrations of racists.)
People who identify as Dems or Gops are probably paying close attention already. It’s them darned Independents who tend to wait and focus at the end. If these lies are allowed to take hold, they become “facts” that can turn public opinion in the fall.
Kerry’s biggest mistake was saying he voted for the war before he voted against it. His second mistake was not slamming back on the Swiftboat ads.
If I were Obama, I’d assemble a rapid response team to take these things down in a very timely fashion. He’d need someone with incredibly high credibility to do it.
One name comes to mind: Oprah.
Dr. D.
Troy King, Alabama’s Attorney General as well as the 
L.F. Eason III, the director of the state of North Carolina’s Standards Laboratory in Raleigh, was forced to resign this week because he refused to follow an order to lower the laboratory’s flags in honor of former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, who died late last week. Eason, 51, had worked for the state for 29 years, the entirety of his career. 
Of all John McCain’s reversals of longheld positions — his 180s on taxes, offshore drilling, intolerant Christians and even torture, to name just a few — nothing is sadder or more disgraceful than his flipflop on Swiftboating, a practice he decried when it was used in 2004 to defame the Democratic presidential nominee, his former friend and fellow Vietnam veteran, Sen. John Kerry.
