This underscores why Team Obama launched their truth-squadding website yesterday as well as the urgency with which they need to define their candidate before November:

Fred Hobbs, a [Tennessee] Democratic Party executive committee member representing part of [Rep. Lincoln] Davis’ district, said he understands why Davis is not endorsing Obama and is “skeptical” of the Illinois senator himself.



“Maybe [it’s] the same reason I don’t want to — I don’t exactly approve of a lot of the things he stands for and I’m not sure we know enough about him,” Hobbs said when asked why he thought Davis wasn’t endorsing Obama. “He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.”



Davis was not made available for comment.



His chief of staff, Beecher Frasier, said he doesn’t know for sure if Obama is “terrorist connected” but he assumes he’s not.





This is not just a low-information voter — Hobbs was a Democratic superdelegate.



As Ben and I wrote last month, the perception of Obama as somehow un-American above all is the central challenge he faces.



UPDATE: Tenn Dem spokesman Wade Munday writes in to clarify that Hobbs was not a superdelegate. He is a member of the state party leadership, though.



Munday blames the GOP for their own activist being "misinformed" and drops a reference to the Southern Strategy.



The Tennessee GOP has indeed twice pushed the envelope on the Obama front, but it would seem that a political activist sophisticated enough to get elected to the state party's executive committee would know who Obama is beyond the caricacture some are happy to perpetuate.

The Tennessee Democratic Party is united behind our party’s nominee, Sen. Barack Obama. Mr. Hobbs is obviously misinformed, and his statement highlights the perpetual efforts of the Republican Party, especially here in Tennessee, to turn Internet smears and highly offensive gossip into their party’s message against Sen. Barack Obama as we head into the general election. Instead of debating the issues, the Tennessee Republican Party continues to rely upon slanderous and salacious tall tales. They are borrowing from the playbook first written by Richard Nixon and employed in the race against Congressman Harold Ford Jr. Tennesseans of every political persuasion are tired of these tactics.

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