"The Willie Hortonization of Obama"

As CNN pundits wondered whether instant, post-debate polls favoring Sen. Barack Obama meant he would win on Election Day, analyst David Gergen stopped them.

"I think it's too early to declare victory, because Barack Obama is black," said Gergen, an adviser to Republican and Democratic presidents. "And until we play out the issue of race in this country, I don't think we'll know and maybe [not until] late in the campaign."

While the Obama campaign has fended off racially rooted attacks since its inception, analysts say the ones surfacing in recent days have been more overt, arriving as many undecided voters are making their final decision. Those attacks have joined the latest in a stream of questions about his background, including his religion and connections to a former 1960s radical.

"It is the Willie Hortonization of Obama," said James Taylor, a University of San Francisco associate professor of political science.

Horton was a Massachusetts felon who committed a rape and armed robbery while on a weekend furlough. Republican strategist Lee Atwater used a TV attack ad featuring the African American to raise the negative impression of the 1988 Democratic nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, in the campaign's final months.

Instead of using a grainy photo of a grizzled convict as Atwater did, this time analysts say the attacks are embedded in "coded" language, from Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin portraying Obama as a cultural outsider and friend to terrorists to the dismissive way his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, referred to Obama at their Tuesday night debate as "that one."

Other recent attacks include an unsubstantiated allegation on Fox News' "Hannity's America" on Sunday that Obama's community-organizing work in Chicago was "training for a radical overthrow of the government." The incendiary allegations — as well as the anti-Semitic background of the allegation's architect, commentator Andy Martin — went unchallenged and undisclosed by the host, conservative commentator Sean Hannity. Fox said the program is the host's opinion, even though the allegation was presented as a documentary. Obama did not respond to Hannity's request for comment.

Martin wrote on his blog that "I am not a 'reporter' assembling facts for a morning newspaper. I am an analyst and expert opinion columnist. I take 'facts' that may or may not make sense in isolation, and I analyze them until patterns emerge and conclusions are apparent."

Then there have been the speakers at McCain-Palin rallies who continue, unchecked by the candidates, to refer to "Barack Hussein Obama" — the emphasis on his middle name presumably is an inference that the Christian Obama is Muslim. The latest occurred Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., when Lehigh County Republican chairman Bill Platt mentioned Obama's former reluctance to wear a flag lapel pin, then said: "Think about how you'll feel on Nov. 5 if you see the news that Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, is president of the United States."

Two days earlier, while introducing Palin at a rally in Clearwater, Fla., Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott also made a reference to "Barack Hussein Obama."

McCain-Palin spokesman Paul Lindsay responded to the incidents Wednesday: "We do not condone this inappropriate rhetoric, which distracts from the real questions of judgment, character, and experience that voters will base their decisions on this November."

Regardless, some attending McCain-Palin rallies are responding to this incitement. The Secret Service is investigating press reports that someone at the Clearwater rally said "kill him" after Palin tried to connect Obama to former Weathermen leader Bill Ayers. Some attending McCain's rally Wednesday in Pennsylvania interrupted him with shouts of "socialist," "terrorist" and "liar."

Earlier this week, Palin told a group of donors in Colorado that "This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America." Obama, Palin said, "is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country," a reference to Obama's connection with Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh echoed this attack by referring to Obama's "mentorship" by Ayers; Obama was a child when Ayers and the Weathermen were carrying out bombings.

Politico.com described Obama's relationship with Ayers: "There's no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation." FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan fact-checking organization, confirmed that description.

And during the week of Sept. 28-Oct. 4, "nearly 100 percent of the McCain campaign's advertisements were negative," according to the nonpartisan Wisconsin Advertising Project. "During the same period, 34 percent of the Obama campaign's ads were negative."

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joseph Biden worried Wednesday that the Republicans were injecting "fear and loathing" into the campaign.

"The idea that a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that — it's just a slippery slope, it's a place that we shouldn't be going," Biden said Wednesday on NBC's "Today" show referring to the shouts of "terrorist" at Palin's rallies.

"I mean, here you have out there these kinds of, you know, incitements out there — a guy introducing Barack using his middle name as if it's some epitaph or something," he said Wednesday on CBS. "This is over the top."

These attacks are no different from the kind Atwater — Karl Rove's political mentor — launched in the 1980s, said Stefan Forbes, director of the documentary "Boogieman: The Lee Atwater Story."

"I don't see how the Democrats don't understand the Lee Atwater playbook. His tactics have been winning elections, even after his death [in 1991]," Forbes said. The Horton campaign "represented the triumph and spin and smear over the issues. They know that if you wrap things in the flag you can sell anything."

The key to Atwater's success was that the candidates remained above the fray.

"They were friendly, like [Ronald] Reagan," Forbes said. "Just like now, Palin is the friendly face or George W. Bush was the guy you wanted to have a beer with. They'll dance around it and say [these tactics] aren't racist, but they are."

"The next couple of weeks are going to be really fascinating," he said. "If the Atwater playbook can destroy Obama when the economy is collapsing the way it is, then it can accomplish almost anything."

But Stanford University political-science professor Paul Sniderman, who recently completed a survey on racial attitudes of voters, doesn't think the attacks will work. He also disagreed with widely circulated polling data that purportedly showed "Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice." He said the results were misinterpreted.

"I will bet my grandchildren's educational trust fund that the outcome of the election will not be affected by those attitudes," Sniderman said. He will contact the respondents to his survey after the election to see how they voted — and to see what factor race played.

Information from The Washington Post is included in this report.