Only in America

What is just weird is this: how can it be that a black man running for president is accused of being too elitist? For the first century of the nation's existence, blacks were kept in chains. For the next century, they were sent to the back of the bus and kept away from whites-only lunch counters and restrooms throughout the South—much less allowed to join the white elite in their schools and clubs and prestigious institutions. Then, starting in the 1960s, American society began to make a concerted effort to open up those doors. Barack Obama is not so much the beneficiary of that effort as the proof that blacks can make it on their own, if given the chance. He was, despite a modest upbringing, elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, a position at the very tip of the meritocratic ziggurat.

Yet to pockets of America, he still seems to be the "other." He seems a little strange, exotic; those cracked e-mails whispering about his middle name (Hussein) and declaring, fictitiously, that he is a Muslim who insisted on being sworn into office on the Qur'an rather than the Bible, keep buzzing around the Internet. To some, his manner is haughty; he is a bit of an egghead, one of those pointy-headed intellectuals whom George W. Bush liked to ridicule as a Deke brother at Yale and even later as president of the United States (and, long before him, demagogues like the anti-Semitic right-wing radio priest of the 1940s, Father Charles Coughlin; Red-baiter Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, and race-baiter Gov. George Wallace of Alabama).

Demagoguing, even in the subtle ways enabled by new media, can have an impact over time. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 13 percent reported that Obama is Muslim. NEWSWEEK reporters on the campaign trail could hear the wariness, even fearfulness, of voters as they spoke about Obama. Secretly taped by a "citizen journalist," then reported online, Obama's remarks to San Francisco fund-raisers—that some voters in economically depressed towns "cling" to religion and guns out of "bitterness"—did not sit well, nor did the endlessly replayed YouTube videos of Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., ranting against America. Richard Vallejo, 65, of Bristol, Pa., a typical working-class town, has voted Democratic all his life. But of Obama, Vallejo says: "He's prejudiced against white people. I'm in a small town and if I own a gun, it's not because I'm bitter. It is because of the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms." In Indiana, the next stop on the primary trail on May 6, Brenda Spreitzer, 42, told a NEWSWEEK reporter at a Clinton rally: "I think Barack's viewpoints and his past is too flamboyant. It's more radical than I want to go … I'm just not comfortable," she said, adding that she is concerned about Obama's practice of generally not wearing an American flag pin. (None of the candidates wear flag pins.) She has been researching Obama on the Internet and discovered that he wants to tear out the bowling alley in the White House (Obama has kiddingly said he wants to replace it with a basketball court). "That freaked me out because no matter if he bowls or not, it's a historic thing that should never be changed."

Hillary Clinton has described Obama's remarks about small-town bitterness as "elitist, out of touch and frankly patronizing." Clinton strategist Harold Ickes tells NEWSWEEK "she clearly has established a connection with people who work hard for a living and are having difficulty making ends meet." One Clinton ad, featuring a waitress in a diner, says, "She's worked the night shift, too" (never mind that she is a graduate of Wellesley and Yale Law). McCain's advisers, meanwhile, have enjoyed watching Clinton attack Obama over his remarks. "Manna from heaven," said one McCain aide, who did not wish to be identified gloating. Come the fall campaign, GOP operatives can be counted on to caricature Obama as a gutter-ball-throwing populist phony who is far more at home in a sherry-sipping faculty club than at a bowling alley.

The Republican Party has had a field day over the past half-century making fun of Democrats who are "effete"—first Adlai Stevenson, a cultivated brainiac who lost twice to Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s; then Michael Dukakis, a former professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who made the mistake of being ludicrously photographed in a tank helmet and allowed himself to be cornered as somehow soft on crime (read: black crime); then John Kerry, a Yale man who seemed to enjoy windsurfing in Nantucket a little too much (forget that he was decorated for valor in Vietnam). Now there is Obama, a man who seems to want to think before he speaks and lacks Hillary Clinton's enthusiasm for hoisting a beer glass or throwing back shots of Crown Royal Canadian whisky for the ever-present cameramen.

Obama has had the misfortune to run for the presidency in an age when reporters are watching, it seems, every time the candidate picks up a fork or orders a meal. Here is The New York Times's Maureen Dowd on Obama's efforts to appear to be a regular guy through carbohydrate consumption: "In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage, and a Philly cheesesteak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheesesteak. But this is clearly a man who can't wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites …"