10/29

Standing in line last night, waiting for early voting – I became aware of the large black man behind me talking on his cell phone. He was interrupting my train of thought, as I was working on my blackberry . . . “Jez,” I thought, “some people cannot go anywhere without talking on their damn cell phones.” And then it struck me. . . He was calling a friend and encouraging him to vote:



“Yo, Dee , did you vote yet? . . . Vote! I said vote. Did you vote yet? No man, I’m in the line for early voting. No, man ya gotta get down here. At the mall. 10 to 7, Monday through Friday, It’s the last week.”



And then, he proceeded to call 6 more friends, and have a similar conversation with each of them . . .



Wow. I needed to check my attitude. . . and am I ever glad some people don’t go anywhere without their cell phones. . .

My friend, Patti, who is working on the Obama campaign wrote to me today (10/20):

We hear stories when we make calls and knock on doors.… we get to talk with people, who in regular life, we might never cross paths with.…

Late one afternoon, I was nearby when field organizer, Joe Babcock knocked on his last door of the day. The man who answered didn’t seem to understand what Joe was saying. Once out on the stoop he said, “Scream right into my ear. I’m 94 years old, and I can’t hear a thing.” Joe is not the kind of person to holler, but he did make himself understood. “Of course I’m voting for Obama,” he replied. He shared that he was a Navy Vet and a lifelong Republican. “My father always said, 'you vote for the man, not the ticket'.”

Earlier I had spoken to a man who seemed to be burned over a large part of his body and had a hard time walking.… He also smelled of alcohol and had a very large dog. “Naaa.… I don’t vote.” Why not, I asked. “I just came from NY so I can’t vote here.… I don’t vote anyways...” I explained in NH he could even register on election day. As I was walking away, I asked one last question--Who do you think you’d would vote for? “Well, I think I’ll give Obama a try,” he smiled... I expect knowing I would be surprised by his answer...

Not everyone is for Obama, of course... People often say "We’re all set" when they don’t want to talk with us. Sometimes they yell... loudly.

I went to another door that day, and the woman said, “Well I could never vote for that man. I mean don’t you think he’d bring in his own... There’d be favoritism." I suggested that every politician chooses people to work with whom they know and trust. And I wo ndered aloud if McCain got elected might not he bring in some white people he trusted. “Oh, he would never do that. And anyway, I’m not prejudiced. I come from New Jersey, and I knew some nice Blacks there.” I said I hoped she’d remember that and not be afraid to vote for a person because of the color of their skin... and moved on to the next house.

Talking with people can be hard, and sometimes I hestitate to make the next call. Last Sunday I said to Joe, Do I really have to call the home of a Republican in his 90s??? Joe isn’t one to pressure people, “You can always just go on to the next one...”

I took a breath and dialed the number.… His wife answered and told me that he’d been buried last week.

We talked about how hard losing a spouse is, and how sad cancer is... but she didn’t stop there. After sharing about her husband, she wanted to talk about the election, ask some questions about Obama and voice some concerns... As the conversation closed, she said she’d been leaning towards Obama for quite some time...


As I drove home that evening I reflected on our conversation, and how important the election is to people... This woman who just lost her 93 year old husband to cancer, is committed to getting to the polls.

A volunteer of ours has become a citizen this year and is so excited about voting for the first time. Her health is in a precarious state, and her insurance company denied a scheduled operation last week because she had maxed out on her benefits.

On the phone the other day Dorothy told me, “I’ll crawl to the polls if I have to.…”

- Patti

October 13, 2008
The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama
By JIM RUTENBERG


The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”


That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.


The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.


Just last Friday, a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,” and “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain corrected her.


Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.


But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.


An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.


He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”


Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.


Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.


“Everybody uses my research as a takeoff point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”


As for his background, he said: “I’m a colorful person. There’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”


When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said Mr. Martin was clearly expressing his opinion and not necessarily fact.


It was not Mr. Martin's first turn on national television. The CBS News program "48 Hours" in 1993 devoted an hourlong program, "See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits," to what it called his prolific filings. (Mr. Martin has also been known as Anthony Martin-Trigona.) He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.


He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.


In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation.


His newfound prominence, and the persistence of his line of political attack — updated regularly on his Web site and through press releases — amazes those from his past.


“Well, that’s just a bookend for me,” said Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, whom Mr. Martin sued for refusing to support him. Mr. Slade said Mr. Martin was driven like “a run-over dog, but he’s fearless.”


Given Mr. Obama’s unusual background, which was the focus of his first book, it was perhaps bound to become fodder for some opposed to his candidacy.


Mr. Obama was raised mostly by his white mother, an atheist, and his grandparents, who were Protestant, in Hawaii. He hardly knew his father, a Kenyan from a Muslim family who variously considered himself atheist or agnostic, Mr. Obama wrote. For a few childhood years, Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia with a stepfather he described as loosely following a liberal Islam.


Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.


Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin.


“What he’s generating gets picked up in other places,” said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins, “and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”


Ms. Allen said Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam. Quoting liberally from Mr. Martin, the article circulated on the Internet, and its contents eventually found their way into various e-mail messages, particularly an added claim that Mr. Obama had attended “Jakarta’s Muslim Wahhabi schools. Wahhabism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging jihad on the rest of the world.”


Mr. Obama for two years attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, where he was taught about the Bible, he wrote in “Dreams From My Father,” and for two years went to an Indonesian public school open to all religions, where he was taught about the Koran.


Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry, both of whom he accused of ignoring his claims that American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam. He previously portrayed Mr. McCain as a “Manchurian candidate.” Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”


Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists.


In his original press release, Mr. Martin wrote that he was personally “a strong supporter of the Muslim community.” But, he wrote of Mr. Obama, “it may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel.” He added, “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles.”


Yet in various court papers, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.


A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”


In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”


In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.


But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”


When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”


He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”


In discussing the denial of his admission to the Illinois bar, Mr. Martin said the psychiatric exam listing him as having a “moderately severe personality defect” was spitefully written by an evaluator he had clashed with.


Mr. Martin, who says he is from a well-off banking and farming family, is clearly pleased with his newfound attention. But, he said, others have added to his work in “scary” ways.


“They Google ‘Islam’ and ‘Obama’ and my stuff comes up and they take that and kind of use that — like a Christmas tree, and they decorate it,” he said. For instance, he said, he did not necessarily ascribe to a widely circulated e-mail message from the Israeli right-wing activist Ruth Matar, which includes the false assertion, “If Obama were elected, he would be the first Arab-American president.”


He said he had at least come to “accept” Mr. Obama’s word that he had found Jesus Christ. His intent, he said, was only to educate.


Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:


Correction: October 14, 2008
An article on Monday about Andy Martin, who has been a source of some of the false rumors about Senator Barack Obama’s background, referred incorrectly to an academic institution where a study of the rumors’ origins was conducted by Prof. Danielle Allen. The Institute for Advanced Study is located in Princeton, N.J., but is not part of Princeton University.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company