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The Beginning Of The Underground Campaign

WASHINGTON -- A well-connected friend in the Hillary Clinton campaign let this slip after a tour of early primary states: "If Barack Obama were white, he'd already be the nominee."

Whoa! So it begins.

The 2008 presidential campaign has just about gone through the many phases of its silly season: "Hillary's got it locked up!" ... "McCain is dead!" ... "The Two Americas of John Edwards!" ... "They'll take Giuliani because he's the only Republican who can win!" ... "Obama's finished!" ... "Fred Thompson is Ronald Reagan!" ... "Mitt Romney is beautiful!" ... "Huckabee! Huckabee! Huckabee!"

The next seven weeks will be a very serious season as candidates in both parties keep their eyes on the prizes of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and then the two dozen probably decisive contests of Feb. 5, 2008.

Then comes the long, dirty season, which will peak in the last weeks of October 2008. There will be some overlap between serious and dirty because they are both for the highest of stakes. Whispers about candidates are directly proportional to their chances for nomination or election. Obama's race, for instance, or Romney's religion only come into heavy play -- word of mouth, anonymous phone calls, unsigned leaflets -- when it looks as if they may win.

When the going gets tough, the tough get dirty.

As the race gets tougher, and closer, the questions, spoken and rarely spoken, become as fundamental as black and white. Nobody is asking anymore whether Barack is black enough. The reaction to the more than 20,000 South Carolina blacks who came out to see and hear Obama and Oprah Winfrey will sooner or later trigger nasty questions about whether he is too black -- and can we accept a black president? Do we want a woman president, particularly that Hillary woman? Is Rudy Giuliani too New York, too Italian, too married or just too sleazy? Is Romney too Mormon -- and what exactly is a Mormon? Is there room enough for both Mike Huckabee and Jesus in the White House?

My business, the press, is a big part of the traditional muddy undertow of American politics. And dirty politics, true or not, is as American as throwing apple pie. Edward J. Larson's new book, "A Magnificent Catastrophe," gives you an idea of what John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were capable of doing.

Newspapers, to say nothing of Fox News and various partisan journals and now blogs, report and evaluate whispers and rumors -- and in the process validate them whether we find them true or not. The latest big-time example of this was a Washington Post lead article on Nov. 29, under the headline: "Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him."

The "Muslim ties" are pretty tenuous -- Obama is a Christian, but his Indonesian stepfather occasionally went to a mosque -- but that did not change the size or placement of the Post story. For my own part, I have dozens of e-mails and letters claiming that last week I maligned Romney, or rather Mormonism, by writing about it. So it goes. Free speech and free press mean just that.

In more recent times than the Adams-Jefferson contest of 1800, polls have also played a role in the underside of American diversity. Without exception in my memory, polls have tended to show black candidates doing better than they eventually do on election days. The latest example was Harold Ford's race for the Senate in Tennessee last year. After both commercials and whispers about him, a black man, and white women, he lost a race that polls indicated he would probably win.

Have we moved past all that? Not completely, I'm sure. But you would have to be blind not to notice women are running more and more governments around the world, that blacks are running some of our own greatest corporations, that Mormons -- Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, for one -- have distinguished themselves in American politics. Times are changing.

And the 2008 election may be about change. Hillary Clinton is fighting to hold on to her front-runner status precisely because Obama and John Edwards have cornered her as a candidate of the past, part of the old establishment that has delivered war but not health care for Americans.

Perhaps, as Andrew Sullivan argues in an influential article essentially endorsing Obama in the current issue of The Atlantic, the Illinois senator embodies change not so much because he isn't a white Methodist like Hillary Clinton, but that she is a classic baby boomer still fighting the battles of the 1960s -- and he is not.

Taking all that history and those arguments together, if you want change perhaps what you want is a woman or a black man or a Mormon or some other kind of mixed and mixed-up American.

In my Dec. 7 column on Mitt Romney's speech on religious freedom, I stated that "no one had ever seen" the golden plates Joseph Smith said were shown to him by the angel Moroni. It would have been more accurate to say "no one had ever read" the plates. Three to 11 witnesses saw the plates, but could not decipher the hieroglyphics on the plates without the magical glasses Smith said he had been given by the angel.

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Related Topics: clinton | edwards | election 2008 | giuliani | huckabee | mccain | obama | romney | thompson |

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