An interesting observation here:

If you look at the crazy attacks on Clinton they always involved Clinton doing something sleazy—running drugs out of that airport in Arkansas, killing dozens of people in Arkansas (google “Clinton body count”), molesting staffers—whereas the crazy attacks on Obama usually involve Obama being a passive participant in something sleazy—the faking of his birth certificate by his family, the writing of his book by Bill Ayers.

But it’s also true that the conspiracy theories about Obama are just so much more pathetic than the Clinton ones. I subscribe to few conspiracy theories but I am interested in what makes a good one, and how they work psychologically. The JFK conspiracy theory is a very good example of the genre. You have a case where the given story has a few glaring flaws, and where the stakes are (or at least were) potentially enormous. If the Russians were involved, wouldn’t that have been an invitation to war? If the government was somehow in on it, then we clearly have something big and ugly on our hands. And so on. And, while most of the JFK conspiracy theories are easily dismissable–Oliver Stone’s film is entertaining but far from convincing, or even coherent–the best ones leave you with that one shadow of doubt that even hardened skeptics can’t quite dismiss. A bad example of a conspiracy theory is the whole thing about Shakespeare allegedly not writing his own plays (soon to be a movie by the director of Independence Day, which is not really my thing, though I’ll see it if the whole thing is scored to Radiohead’s Kid A like the trailer). This theory–usually presented as a desperate attempt by schoolteachers to show how totally controversial and crazy the world o’ Shakespeare is–just doesn’t cut it. It’s low-impact, there are no stakes, and if it were true it would change nothing. They wouldn’t even change the name on the books because you don’t change a pen name, like there’s no “Sam Clemens” section in your local Barnes & Noble. They’d just have to swap out the paintings of Shakespeare for some other guy, and that’s it. All of this is a prologue to say that I think that the conspiracy theories around Barack Obama are just really lame, while the Clinton ones were more compelling (though I suspect equally untrue). Why is that? At least with Clinton there were all these deaths and loose ends that got woven into outlandish theories, and they were more effective at damaging Clinton because even the suggestion–however farfetched–that the president is murdering people is unnerving and scary. But is anyone really afraid that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s books, or that Obama himself was born in Kenya? The practical effects of these things being true are zero, which is why they’re so easy to dismiss. Zero stakes, in other words. These frankly aren’t scary prospects unless you already buy into the whole right-wing worldview and know exactly how to put them into context. This is opposed to the Clinton stuff, which is pretty much accessible to everyone. Just another sign that the right wing is becoming more insular and inscrutable to everyone else, I suppose.