By JAMES KIRCHICK | 7/1/08 12:33 PM EST

The only obstacle between Barack Obama and the presidency is the mountain of smears that will no doubt come
his way. That’s the narrative that Obama supporters — and his swooning
chroniclers in the mainstream media — would have us believe.

Obama himself set up a website, fighthesmears.com,
correcting some e-mail chain letters that allege he “can’t produce his
birth certificate,” is “secretly a Muslim” and that he “won’t say the
Pledge of Allegiance.” In May, Newsweek published a cover story
confirming the Obama campaign’s fears, declaring that “the Republican
Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968.”

Writers Evan Thomas and Richard Wolfe concluded that the 2008
presidential election will be no different. “It is a sure bet that the
GOP will try to paint Obama as ‘the other’ — as a haughty black
intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs
around with America-haters.”

But has it been a “sure bet?”

Not really. Thus far, no one with any serious affiliation to John McCain's
campaign has resorted to the alleged “scare” tactics in which
Republicans — and, apparently, only Republicans — have been perfecting
since Richard Nixon was first elected. On the contrary, if the past few
months have showed us anything, it’s that the Obama campaign is the one
dealing in crude smears.
There have been only two incidents in which people officially
associated with McCain have done anything approaching what Thomas and
Wolfe predicted those dastardly, conniving Republicans would inevitably
do. In February, a conservative talk radio host speaking at a McCain
rally made reference to “Barack Hussein Obama.” McCain immediately
condemned the statement, leading the embittered and embarrassed
professional yacker to complain that McCain “threw me under the bus.”
The only other smear-worthy episode occurred in March, when the McCain
campaign suspended a low-level aide who provided a link on his Twitter
account to a video featuring the rants of Obama's former pastor, the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Heavy stuff, to be sure.

Contrast the absence of smears from the McCain camp with some of the
outlandish remarks made by high-ranking Obama supporters. In April,
West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV said that because McCain “was
a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet,”
and “was long gone when they hit,” the Arizona senator who spent five
and a half years in a Vietcong tiger cage having his arms repeatedly
broken didn’t really understand the carnage of war. “What happened when
[the missiles] get to the ground?” Rockefeller asked a crowd at an
Obama rally. “He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of
people. McCain never gets into those issues.” That the great-grandson
of John D. Rockefeller would impugn the wartime experience of John
McCain is especially rich, given that the only “battle” Rockefeller has
seen is when he hunts wild game at his 80-acre ranch in Jackson Hole,
Wyo.

Rockefeller’s smear was the first salvo in a pattern of attacks meant
to insinuate that McCain’s Vietnam experience not only shouldn’t count
as meaningful “experience,” but rendered him psychologically unfit for
presidential office. In May, Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin said of
McCain, “Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always
having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous.”
Over the weekend, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark said that McCain is
“untested and untried,” and elaborated that, “I don't think getting in
a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become
president.” Clark, you may remember, ran for president in 2004 on his
record as a career military officer, so his comment, which he has not
retracted, was not just morally offensive but self-discrediting.
The smears didn’t stop there. On Monday, Obama foreign policy adviser
Rand Beers unfavorably compared McCain’s POW experience with “the
members of the Senate who were in the ground forces or who were ashore
in Vietnam,” and who “have a very different view of Vietnam and the
cost ... than John McCain does because he was in isolation essentially
for many of those years and did not experience the turmoil here or the
challenges that were involved for those of us who served in Vietnam
during the Vietnam War.”

It’s curious how anyone could argue that a man with such visceral
understanding of the capacity for what America’s enemies will do to our
men and women in uniform doesn’t fully appreciate the cost of war. But
even more troubling is the unmistakable pattern of these smears, all of
them unsubtly alleging that McCain is an unhinged, mentally unstable
warmonger who would deploy soldiers capriciously because he hasn’t
truly experienced the horrors of ground battle. Indeed, the claims of
these four men — and the short period of time in which they were all
uttered — are so similar in tone that one would be foolish not to at
least consider the possibility they were coordinated by the Obama
campaign.

Nevertheless, the fears of Obama supporters that their candidate lies
eternally vulnerable to GOP smears exists only in their fevered
imaginations. The evidence of dirty Republican tricks has been utterly
absent this campaign season. And if anyone has tried to smear Barack
Obama in the way that Thomas, Wolfe and other Democratic partisans
allege, it was not the Republican National Committee, but rather
Hillary Rodham Clinton and her surrogates. In February, the Drudge
Report claimed that the Clinton campaign circulated photos of Obama in
a traditional East African turban and robe, with the message that the
images showed him “dressed.” Asked if there was any truth to the smear
that Obama is a Muslim, she infamously replied, “As far as I know,” it
wasn’t the case. After the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, she
said the results showed that "Sen. Obama's support among working,
hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.”

The belief that “the Republican Party has been successfully scaring
voters since 1968” is a comforting salve for Democrats. After all, it’s
much easier for them to demonize conservatives than consider that the
reason for their electoral defeats may lie with liberal ideas. Please
don’t take that as a "smear.”

James Kirchick is an assistant editor of The New Republic.