Here's a distressing number for you: according to the Here's a distressing number for you: according to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the percentage of respondents who think Barack Obama him as a Muslim increased five points since their last poll, from 8 percent to 13 percent.
Of course it's well documented that there are already a number of right-wing smear campaigns underway to promote this idea. But I think these numbers are evidence of the success that members of his own party have had in injecting questions about his race and religious beliefs (and tying the two together) into the primary. The Clinton camp has repeatedly and unsubtly pushed his race to the center of the campaign, and is doing their best to paint him as guilty of being a white-people-hating, Louis-Farrakhan-loving, militant by association. Josh Marshall nailed the matter yesterday in his commentary on the recent reemergence of chatter surrounding video of Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright. As Marshall points out, this – coming right at the heels of the Ferraro flap -- is very dangerous for the party:
Clinton's campaign and her surrogates have injected the subject of Obama's race into this campaign too many times now for it to be credible to believe that it is anything but a conscious strategy [...] It is insufficient to say that Republicans will do this in the fall so there's nothing to be lost in hearing it now from Democrats. Because by doing this now, as a Democratic campaign, they are mainstreaming the message. If Obama is the nominee, when this emerges again, no doubt in a harsher, more rancid incarnation, it will come pre-approved by dint of a Democratic campaign's imprimatur.
But as the campaign slogs forward, it seems likes the Clinton camp doesn't really care about that at all.
--Kate Sheppard
