The Lone Ranger

Obama, my Hairdresser and the Power of Propaganda

Obama may have come out on top after the third TV debate but it's too early to write off McCain. SPIEGEL ONLINE blogger Peter Ross Range learns at his hairdressers the power of misinformation in this year's presidential campaign.

So I'm sitting in the hair salon, getting a haircut, and my Korean immigrant hairdresser begins telling me all the reasons she plans to vote for John McCain.

First, she says, Barack Obama wants to “give away money to the poor people.” That, she declares, “is socialism.” Admitting that she earns about $30,000-40,000 a year before tax, she begins defending the lawyers who earn $250,000 or more and would have to pay a higher tax rate under Obama’s tax plan. “These are my customers. They have lots of bills, two or three kids in college, big houses, two cars. Things are hard for them, too.”

Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama.

It was breathtaking.

Here an up-by-her-bootstraps first-generation immigrant, who lives in a small city apartment that she shares with her sister, is coming to the rescue of highly-paid Washington lawyers with big houses in the suburbs. “They shouldn’t have to pay more taxes than other people,” she continues, snip-snip. “They work hard, just like I do.” Snip, snip.

Her sister, who also earns around $30,000 per year, pipes up. “I know his tax idea is probably good for us. We don’t earn so much. But it’s wrong that he wants to tax other people so much. I will vote for McCain.”

It was a bracing moment, and a quick reminder of the power of misinformation. We’re only two blocks from the White House. My interlocutors (the two sisters) are self-proclaimed “news junkies.” And yet they’ve bought into one of the biggest canards of the McCain propaganda machine: that Barack Obama is a socialist.

In the American political lexicon, socialist is a dirty word second only to communist. Both words translate into “un-American,” which is maybe the worst epithet of all.

The fact is that only 5 percent of US households have incomes greater than $250,000. And the analyses I’ve read suggest Obama’s plan to raise taxes on those households, though supposedly a 3-percent increase from 36 percent to 39 percent, would in fact translate into relatively modest tax hikes. Silly me, I thought everyone understood that.

Not my hairdressers. And to the extent that one of them grasped that she would be better off under Obama’s plan, her devotion to the anti-socialist principle leads her to vote knowingly against her own self-interest.

Was there an element of racial prejudice here? I don’t think so. I asked a few probing questions along those lines. The woman cutting my hair stopped and looked into the mirror right at me: “It shouldn’t matter about his color.” As she did so, she waved her hands toward her own face, hardly the same color as America’s white majority. I think she understands racial stereotyping.

But race and ethnicity may yet raise their hoary heads in the final days of this election campaign. It was reported on Wednesday that anti-Obama fliers bearing the name of the Ku Klux Klan -- the 143-year-old anti-black terrorist group -- had been distributed in a small town in Oklahoma. Notorious for lynchings, burnings and killings, the Klan has almost disappeared from America -- but apparently still exists in a few isolated spots. To their credit, the citizens of the town --called Ada -- have denounced the fliers. Yet the very existence of such a campaign speaks to the lingering but hard-to-measure potency of racial intolerance in America, especially in small towns, rural areas and places, like Oklahoma and the Deep South, that have brutal histories of racial conflict.

Another touchy topic that just won’t go away is the perception that Obama is not supportive of Israel, a threshold issue with many Jewish voters. (Jews are only 2 percent of the US population, but their votes can be crucial in swing states like Florida, where the race will be very close.)

Obama has repeatedly vowed his unequivocal support for the Jewish state, but he keeps being blindsided. For example, it hardly helps that the Rev. Jesse Jackson, once America’s most prominent black politician, told a New York Post reporter that, under an Obama presidency, “ decades of putting Israel's interests first" would come to an end. Jackson, who ran twice for president, is obviously bitter that Obama has succeeded in national politics where he failed. Jackson once said he would like to castrate Obama for not being sufficiently supportive of poor blacks.

Little wonder that he is not playing a role in the Obama campaign and, as he admitted in a subsequent statement, "has never had a conversation with Sen. Obama about Israel or the Middle East." That did not stop the McCain campaign from seizing on Jackson’s remarks as proof that Obama’s commitment to Israel might be shaky.

Like my Korean hairdresser, a lot of folks in South Florida --elderly Jews in particular -- might pick up on only a portion of this spat, the part that feeds their fears and prejudices. And that’s what is shocking at this late stage of the political campaign, and America’s never-ending wrestle with race. May it soon come to an end.