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Swift Boat Author Attacks Obama With New Book

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The New York Times

Published: August 13, 2008

In the summer of 2004, the conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi shot to the top of the best-seller lists as co-author of "Unfit for Command," the book attacking Sen. John Kerry's record on a Vietnam War Swift boat that began the larger, damaging campaign against Kerry's war credentials as he sought the presidency.

Almost exactly four years after that campaign began, Corsi has released a new attack book painting Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up "extensive connections to Islam" - Obama is a Christian - and questioning whether Obama's admitted experimentation with drugs during high school and college ever ceased.

Significant portions of "The Obama Nation," released by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster that has as its chief editor, Mary Matalin, the former Republican operative turned publisher-pundit, have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since it made its debut on Aug. 1.

But it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hard covers this Sunday - at No. 1. The book is pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Obama and an aggressive marketing campaign.

"The goal is to defeat Obama," Corsi said. "I don't want Obama to be in office." In its timing, authorship and style of reportage, the book is reminiscent of the book that Corsi wrote with his co-author, John O'Neill, about Kerry, "Unfit for Command," which included various charges that were ultimately undermined by news reports pointing out the contradictions.

But books like "Unfit for Command," which remained for some 12 weeks on the Times best-seller list, and, now, "The Obama Nation," have become an effective and favored delivery system for political attacks.

The sensational findings in these books, whether dubious or true, can quickly come to dominate the larger political discussion in the media, especially on cable television and the less readily detectible confines of talk radio and partisan Web sites.

Several of the book's charges, in fact, are unsubstantiated, misleading or inaccurate.

For instance, Corsi writes that Obama had "yet to answer" whether he "stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended to his law school days or beyond," asking, "How about in the U.S. Senate?"

But Obama, who acknowledged occasional marijuana and cocaine use during his high school and early college years, wrote in his memoir that he had "stopped getting high" when he moved to New York in the early 1980s.

And in an interview in 2003 with The State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill., he said in response to questions of his drug use, "By the time I was 20, I don't think I indulged again."

In exploring Obama's denials that he had been present for incendiary sermons of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Corsi cites a report in the conservative Web site NewsMax.com that Obama had attended a sermon on July 22, 2007, in which Wright blamed "the 'white arrogance' of America's Caucasian majority for the world's suffering, especially the oppression of blacks."

Obama was giving a speech in Florida that afternoon, and his campaign reported he had not attend Wright's church that day.

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