Fighting the Obama biography instead of policy

Jeff Zeleny:

Senator Barack Obama’s political appeal has always stemmed in part from his biography. For nine months, he has been telling his story in dozens of visits across Iowa, amplified by a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign and a robust network of admirers.

But as voters start narrowing their options in the Democratic presidential race, Mr. Obama is trying to re-establish his story line in the face of misinformation, the long shadow of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and perhaps prejudice as well.

“You have e-mails saying that I’m a Muslim plant that’s trying to take over America,” Mr. Obama told voters the other day at a rally in eastern Iowa. “If you get this e-mail from someone you know, set the record straight.”

Now his campaign’s effort to reach Iowans who have received anonymous e-mail messages questioning his patriotism or faith has grown more organized. In each of his 33 state field offices, workers are armed with two letters of rebuttal.

The first is signed by three Iowa ministers, a nun and a church elder, who write, “Senator Obama is a committed Christian who found Christ long before entering politics and has been outspoken about his faith ever since.”

The second, signed by three retired generals, is intended to refute widely circulated e-mail message questioning Mr. Obama’s patriotism by showing a picture of him not placing his hand over his heart while the national anthem played before a political speech.

“Senator Obama’s personal history represents the best of the American Dream,” the letter says. “His grandfather fought in Patton’s army and went to school on the G.I. Bill. His grandmother worked on a bomber assembly line during World War II.”

In the closing weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Obama is placing a renewed emphasis on his biography as he tries to increase his appeal to working-class voters. Through his life story, he wants to offer himself as more than simply a political alternative to Mrs. Clinton and former Senator John Edwards.

Though previously hesitant to talk extensively about his mother, who died of cancer more than a decade ago, he mentioned her again and again this week in telling voters he understood what it was like to grow up, for a time, with a single mother who relied on food stamps. And her struggle with cancer, he said, taught him about the health care system.

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Well, did his mother get treatment? The story does not say, which suggest she probably did. If she did what does that say about the Democrats' attempt to impose more government on the health care business?

Obama does not deserve to lose because of his biography real or imagined. I think it is probably that these stories are circulated by Democrats because Republicans would love to run against him.

He deserves to lose because he is wrong about the war in Iraq and the war on terror. He knows little or nothing about strategy and is not smart enough to listen to generals like Petraeus. He deserves to lose because he is a liberal who believes in liberal solutions to problems. The course he wants to take in Iraq would be a real disaster and not the imagined one he and other liberals think it is now. It would snatch defeat from the jaws of a victory that is taking place right now on the ground and hand al Qaeda an undeserved victory.