There are a lot of attacks coming against Obama from the far-right… Many of them are utterly baseless, but the problem is that not many of them have been ‘debunked’ yet, so aside from people who are really familiar with his history and his entire platform, they’ll seem true. For example, there’s a strong argument that he’s going to raise taxes, not just on those making over $250k/year as he said, but on those making $32,000 a year or more. This is patently false, and comes from misinterpreting his non-binding vote for budget appropriations, but it sounds scary and if that’s all you see, you’re going to be shocked and want to vote for McCain.

The problem is that the Obama campaign is doing a bad job fighting these things. I posted about their Fight the Smears page, but it hasn’t been updated in a while… Or at all, really. I’ve submitted several things and they haven’t showed up, or even gotten a reply.

They need to have a person (or a group of people) on staff full-time who scour the web looking for all of the attacks being used against Obama. (There are a lot of them, and they’re easy to find.) But then, they need to be able to interact with policy advisers, spokespeople, and even Obama himself, to accurately counter each of these. And there needs to be a site full of these things. Or even a (moderated!) discussion forum.

I find it hard to believe that this position doesn’t already exist, but if it does, they’re utterly failing at communicating what they’re doing. It needs to be easy to rebut any of the attacks being used against him, and it’s currently not.