Today on TAP Online we have two pieces about attempts to smear Michelle Obama and, by extension, her husband. Paul Waldman looks at conservative efforts to use her to stoke racist sentiments:
Let's remember why some conservatives were briefly so enamored of Barack Obama: because, in right-wing eminence grise William Bennett's words, "he never brings race into it." But in most of the conservative movement, race was never out of it. While the Jeremiah Wright controversy failed to convince sufficient numbers of Americans that Barack is an Angry Black Man, there was still an option open to stoke the fires of racial resentment. Michelle Obama could become the Angry Black Woman.
And Dave Weigel explains how Larry Johnson went from a netroots darling to a pariah by becoming the most prominent promoter of the Michelle Obama "whitey" rumor:
Johnson's following at places like Daily Kos was always something of a fluke. He followed four years as a CIA analyst with four years at the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. Johnson left intelligence work in 1993, going on to build a dual career as a business consultant and a pundit on intelligence issues. He argued throughout the 1990s, on shows like The News Hour and Larry King Live, that domestic law enforcement was dropping the ball on terrorist threats while the threat of international terror was decreasing. In this age before blogs, Johnson's commentary, whether printed in The New York Times or submitted in congressional hearings, was dry, analytic, and laced with facts.
And, in an article from our last print issue, Paul Starr marvels at just how improbable the primary season would have seemed not so long ago:
Now that Barack Obama has secured his party's presidential nomination, it is a good moment to assess the extraordinary and improbable thing that the Democrats have done. It was not intuitively obvious, particularly to those who saw the party's central task as winning back the Reagan Democrats, that the best way to retake the presidency would be to nominate an African American with an Islamic-sounding name. In the abstract, before Obama emerged, that concept had not suggested itself, and some political insiders may be excused for not immediately grasping its genius.
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