In campaign's dark corners, whispers entice the gullible

Barack Obama is not a member of a socialist party. Neither Obama nor John McCain is a foreigner. Sarah Palin is not Trig's grandmother. And Joe Biden is not dropping out of the race.

Oh, and none of them are having sordid affairs.

But it's rumor season again in this country, and with just a week to go before the election, both campaigns are frantically knocking down these rumors -- often spreading virally on the Internet -- along with a steady stream of other nasty hints and allegations that range from the questionable to the outrageous.

One thing you can believe: It will only get worse between now and Election Day.

"With just days left to go in the campaign, it's use it or lose it time. If you're a candidate, now's the time to get it out, to sear it in voters' minds just before they go to the voting booth," said University of California, Santa Cruz, psychology professor Anthony Pratkanis, who researches propaganda and social influence.

The trouble with rumors, as representatives of both campaigns say, is that even refuting them means they are repeated. Nonetheless, they say that sometimes you have to talk about it, explain why it's false and move on.

"It's obviously an unfortunate development that we've seen in this election season, more than in elections past, but ultimately we trust the voters and their good sense," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.

Obama's spokesman Tommy Vietor said the campaign's strategy has been to "confront these rumors head-on" with a designated Web site -- stopthesmears.com -- and to make sure precinct captains are given factual information to counter the "ridiculous false rumors that have swirled in this campaign."

"Our experience is that voters are smart, voters are resourceful," said Vietor.

Recently, rumors about Obama, mostly floated online and on conservative radio and television talk shows, have intensified. They usually come in the form of questions.

"Who wrote Obama's autobiography, 'Dreams From My Father?' " asked conservative Web sites and talk show hosts last week, hinting that the writing is so similar to that of William Ayers that Ayers must have been the true author. He wasn't.

As old as Jefferson and Adams

Although this year's rumors have been ferocious and often bizarre, the phenomenon of whisper campaigns, misinformation and smears is as much a part of our nation's roots as elections themselves.

Thomas Jefferson was accused of being anti-Christian; his opponents warned that he would destroy the religious fabric and values of the country and promote an orgy of rape, incest and adultery. John Adams, opponents said, was pro-monarchy and was planning to marry his son to the daughter of King George III.

"These smears are a great American tradition, going back to our earliest contested elections," said Pratkanis.

Eight years ago, McCain lost a strong lead in the South Carolina GOP primary, and possibly even the presidency, after what a campaign aide later described as "a textbook example of a smear."

Using e-mail and push polls, Republican opponents spread the false rumor that his adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually his biological and illegitimate black child. That lie was enough, observers say, to cost McCain South Carolina.

Obama has faced the vast majority of false rumors in this long election season. But when Alaska's Gov. Sarah Palin was tapped to be McCain's running mate, a deluge of rumors began about the little-known Republican from a remote state.

Three days after her selection, reporters from a dozen national media organizations, including the AP, lined up at a Palmer, Alaska, courthouse counter and, one after another, paged through a divorce settlement of a friend of Palin's to see whether she was named as the cause of their strife. She wasn't.

"Terrible and false rumors have dogged Senator Obama for the past two years, no doubt, but the Republican ticket has quickly caught up. At one point, there were 93 separate rumors about Palin," said Nick DiFonzo, a psychologist and rumor expert at Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York. "I think everyone's a loser in this situation."

Rumors are often most effectively floated when a candidate is first introduced, so that voters see everything that follows through the screen of those initial rumors.

Or they're floated just before the election, so that the smears are fresh in voters' minds when they go to the polls.

Andy Martin, a self-described "anti-Obama nemesis," is the source of some of the most vicious rumors about Obama, including current claims that the candidate lied about who his real father is and that he is not a U.S. citizen.

"Look, the way I see it, one person's rumor is another person's fact," said Martin, who is also known as a prodigious filer of lawsuits with anti-Semitic overtones. He said spreading rumors is "disgusting and I never do it." But he has conceded that his own claim that Obama is secretly a Muslim, something Martin repeated on nationally broadcast television and radio talk shows, is false. Obama is a Christian.