What drives Barack Obama’s “doubters and haters”?

So asks Obama biographer David Maraniss in a recent op-ed article for the Washington Post. By doubters and haters he means the people who think Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., that he’s a secret Muslim, or that he’s a closet socialist.

He has an answer: “Some of it can be attributed to the give-and-take of today’s harsh ideological divide. Some of it can be explained by the way misinformation spreads virally to millions of like-minded people, reinforcing preconceptions. And some of it, I believe, arises out of fears of demographic changes in this country, and out of racism.”

True enough! Some people are no doubt driven by such motivations and anxieties; “some” is a gloriously accommodating word.

But that hardly settles things. For an essay titled “What Drives the Obama Doubters and Haters,” Maraniss offers no explanation until the last paragraph (the quote above). And even then he offers no evidence, just assertions.

I think Maraniss is a great reporter, and I don’t believe for a moment he is in on a cover-up of Obama’s “real” place of birth or his secret Muslim faith. (Nor do I think either allegation is true.)

As to Obama’s closet socialism, I’ve never found it unreasonable (never mind racist or paranoid) to think Obama’s more comfortable with European-style social democracy (a.k.a. socialism).

Still, let me add two culprits to Maraniss’s list: The first is Barack Obama. The second is the journalistic establishment that worked so hard to get him elected.

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