Here's Barrett Sheridan on the much-discussed anti-Obama book "The Obama Nation" (which I discussed here). One key thing Barrett doesn't mention in his analysis of whether Corsi's claims will stick: the simple truth, as the National Review's Byron York has written, that "the power of the Swift Boat accusations was based on the fact that Kerry's fellow officers believed him unfit to be commander-in-chief. They had specific stories, based on their first-hand memories, to tell about Kerry's service in Vietnam"--even if they were disputed. He continues: "Now, Corsi's Obama book, while selling well, doesn't have the same impact. If he had written it with — to come up with a hypothetical — several of the ministers who worked with Obama in the 1980s who say he is unfit for office, then that would have been a big story, and comparable to the Swift Boat book. But those ministers aren't saying that. This is not 2004." That's why I suspect Corsi's attempt to counteract Obama's autobiographical narrative won't prove particularly sticky.

You know something is truly successful when its name becomes a verb. Think, Google, Digg, Xerox. The 2004 U.S. presidential campaign added another word to this list: Swiftboat, meaning to use "allegations, falsehoods, exaggerations or distortions...to discredit a person or entity," according to UrbanDictionary.com. That entry surely brings a smile to the face of Jerome Corsi, co-author of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry." The book formed the basis of a vicious, multi-million-dollar attack campaign against the presidential candidate's record as a decorated Vietnam War veteran, which some credit as a key reason for his defeat at the polls.

Flash forward to this election year and another Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. “They will try to Swiftboat me," he acknowledged at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in January. It took seven months, but he was right: "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," also by Jerome Corsi, was released on August 1. After a heavy media push, with Corsi appearing on scores of television and radio shows, the book debuts on The New York Times bestseller list this week in the number one spot. At Amazon.com, it stood at number two overall last week, and number one in non-fiction. As of August 10, it had already sold 62,000 copies, according to Nielsen Bookscan. With a first printing of 475,000, the book's publisher clearly expects demand to stay hot.

Little in "The Obama Nation" is new; it’s largely a collection of conservatives’ suspicions about the candidate, including his drug use and purported ties to Islam. Although Corsi claims the book is “scrupulously sourced,” with “nearly 700 footnotes,” left-wing watchdog groups have already called some of its most basic assertions into question. “Literally, within minutes of cracking open the pages we saw that [the book] was riddled with errors,” says J. Jioni Palmer, press secretary for Media Matters for America, which describes itself as a "progressive" group that tracks "conservative misinformation." The Obama campaign has released its own 41-page rebuttal, which notes that Corsi’s book can’t even get right simple facts like the year of Obama’s marriage. And the original Swiftboat victim himself, John Kerry, has launched a site called TruthFightsBack.com to discredit the book and prevent what happened to him in 2004 from happening to Obama. (“The liars are back,” Senator John Kerry wrote in the subject line of an e-mail sent last week to supporters. “Time to finish them off.”)

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the assertions won’t stick like so much slung mud. “It depends on how swiftly and thoroughly the mainstream media debunks [these] vicious smears and baseless attacks,” Palmer says. It also depends on Corsi himself; he claims to be working with conservative groups planning to run Swiftboat-style attack ads against Obama in the fall. But the author is far from a perfect spokesman. In the past, Corsi has made racist comments online (which he later apologized for), and his other books are hardly credibility enhancing. His previous one, published in July 2007, argued that President Bush has a secret plan to merge the U.S. with Mexico and Canada in an EU-like superstate. And in radio interviews, he's indicated that his next book, which he put on hold to finish “The Obama Nation,” will be a conspiracy theory-laden account of 9/11 that says that the "government’s explanation [of that day] is not a sufficient explanation." With a background like that, the Obama campaign should have plenty to work with in the event they want to do a little Swiftboating of their own.