April 28, 2008	Monday	Rabi-us-Sani 21, 1429

CHICAGO: As Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama tries to make his mark on the national stage, characters from his past keep dogging his step.

A series of controversies slowed his momentum ahead of the key Pennsylvania primary, helping rival Hillary Clinton capture a double-digit win on Tuesday that kept her flagging campaign alive.

The former law professor was cast as an elitist after he said people in small towns clung to guns and religion because they were bitter about decades of job losses.

And both Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain questioned Obama’s patriotism by highlighting his links to a 1960’s radical just weeks after the airways were filled with incendiary clips from his former pastor’s sermons.

These kind of attacks — the most recent of which has seen McCain warning that Obama would be the “candidate of Hamas” — are likely to intensify in the general election should Obama get the party’s nomination, analysts said.

“It’s a setback that’s taken him off message (but) it is the normal election cycle. No one is perfect,” pollster John Zogby said.

The attacks are inevitable, but what matters is whether they will succeed in alienating voters Obama could otherwise capture or if they will simply serve to help motivate the Republican base, said Mark Hansen, a political science professor at the University of Chicago.

“These charges and counter charges matter a whole lot less than the campaigns believe or people make out ... It basically serves to bring the partisans home,” Hansen said.

“The question is who the people in the middle are going to come out for.” In a bid to sway voters on the fence, McCain this week attempted to capitalise on a comment made by a political adviser for the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, who reportedly said Obama was a “great man with great principle.” ”I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas’s worst nightmare,” McCain said. “If Senator Obama is favoured by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.” Even though Obama has repeatedly said he would not meet with Hamas, which won 2006 elections and controls the Gaza Strip but is viewed as a terror outfit by the US and Europe, there is plenty more old mud to be slung at Obama, analysts said.

“His rivals, especially as he heads into the general election, will look to associate him with some people who have controversial pasts,” warned Chicago Sun Times political columnist Lynn Sweet.

The most damaging to date has been Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Obama used the controversy to make a major speech on healing racial divides, denouncing Wright’s more controversial statements but refusing to disown the influential church leader.

Obama has also escaped much damage from his long-time friendship with political fundraiser Tony Rezko, who is currently on trial for bribery and influence peddling.

While Obama is not accused of any wrongdoing and has subsequently donated all the money raised by Rezko to charity, he is under fire for entering a land deal with the real estate developer.

Other controversial figures are more loosely linked, but still potentially damaging, such as 1960’s radical Bill Ayers who has said he does not think his group, the Weather Underground which bombed of government buildings, did enough to stop the Vietnam War.

Obama, was quickly to condemn the Weather Underground as “detestable” and note that Ayers is now a respected professor with whom he simply served on a few Chicago committees.

Another is Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has not yet played a major role in the campaign but could resurface in an attempt to undermine Obama’s support in the Jewish community because of Farrakhan’s history of anti-Semitic remarks.

While Obama both renounced and rejected Farrakhan’s support during an early debate with Clinton, he did participate in Farrakhan’s Million Man March and both Wright and Obama’s Trinity United Church have close ties to the South Side Chicago mosque.

Another potential issue could be Obama’s admitted youthful dalliance with marijuana and cocaine, which only briefly became a campaign issue when a Clinton adviser warned it could prove fodder for Republican attack ads.

“Obama seems poised to be the Democratic nominee in part because he has been able to prevail whenever faced with an obstacle,” Sweet of the Sun-Times said in a telephone interview.

“That doesn’t mean he hasn’t had some bruises along the way. But nothing that has happened so far has (truly) hurt him.”—AFP