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Give him your money now, the idea goes, or they'll succeed.

By Mark Kilmer Posted in 2008 | Obama | Scary Guy — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The old Halloween song began with a litany: "Witches, pumpkin heads, and black cats; scary ghosts and black bats." It did not frighten me as a child, and political candidates do not have me chasing Depends now.

What is scary?

Obama is trying to frighten his supporters into donating large lump sums to his campaign by outlining the GOP strategy being used against him. (I assume someone's passing him notes, or he's communing with the spirit of Lee Atwater via the Ouija.)

At a Chicagoland fundraiser, per CNN's Political Ticker:

“But that accurately captures, I think, the strategy. They’re [Republicans] going to try to make me into a scary guy. They’re even trying to make Michelle into a scary person. Right?" Obama said. "And so that drumbeat – 'we’re not sure if he’s patriotic or not; we’re not sure if he is too black.'

"I don’t know, before I wasn’t black enough," Obama said. " 'Now he might be too black. We don’t know whether he’s going to socialize – well, who knows what.' "

Aside from the race card, which the media encourages Obama to play, telling the truth about Obama certainly raises a cause for concern about the man. We know of Obama's friends, mentors, and soul mates – Ayers, Wright, Pfleger, etc. – and that is also a cause for concern.

Obama holds that voters are being frightened of his wife Michelle. It seems that when she said that she had never been proud of the United States until her husbands well-received presidential campaign, she mean that she had never been proud of politics in America until that Monday, February 18, 2008.

Was she trying to scare us? (The Boston Herald did select a rather scary picture of Mrs. Obama to use with the just linked story, though. That was their call.)

Read On…

According to Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun Times' DC blog, Obama's peeps are trying to make what could be considered scary to appear friendly and jocular. Some people, the Obama campaign believes, are shaking in their bitter boots over the candidate's middle name, for instance.

One guest wrote "Hussein" as his middle name on his nametag as a joke, sort of a try to desensitize people to Obama's middle name. “They have these wonderful stickers that said, ‘Rick Hussein Fizdale,’” Mr. Obama said. “The theory was, we’re all Hussein.”

I'm scratching my head.
Again, though I'm not about to wet myself, Obama's history, friends and mentors, attitudes, and claim to godhead give me cause for concern. This has nothing to do with his middle name. (Nixon did not become frightening to some because his middle name was Milhouse.) This has nothing to do with whether his skin is this or that color to whatever proportion. Obama can be seen, legitimately, as a disturbing candidate.

But we can trust Mark Halperin of the glossy infotainment weekly TIME to put us all in a lighter mood. From the pool report:

After telling everyone that the race is “three-quarters of the way done,” he finished speaking, and there was coffee, fruit parfait, cheese and crackers.

I dig fruit parfait.

Frighten me? No, Barry, I think startled is a better word.

And in a show of solidarity with nothing in particular, I'll sign this: Mark "Hussein" K.