With just under two weeks until the election, anonymous donors and super PACs are pulling out all the stops to flood swing states with often crude incendiary anti-Obama material.
Billboards, free DVDs in the mail, and of course, TV commercials are all pushing the false conspiracy theory that Obama is a Muslim and has been hiding the true story of his birth.
The extreme nature of these materials, though, could be having a counter-productive effect among independent and undecided voters. On PoliticsNation Wednesday night, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank told the Rev. Al Sharpton that these media have "to be offending the centrist voters that these guys need to reach in Ohio."
In Ohio, Pennsylvania, and four other states, a major cable provider is providing the anti-Obama film "Obama 2016" to its subscribers for free. Created by conservative Dinesh D'Souza—who recently resigned as President of The King's College after details of an extramarital affair emerged—the film claims that Obama's worldview is "anti-colonialist, anti-white and anti-Christian."
This isn't a case of just another movie being offered for free—an executive said "this is the first time the cable provider has offered such a deal for a recently released feature film."
A DVD of this film and similar ones are being directly mailed to voters in Florida as well. And dotting the Sunshine State's interstate are massive billboards depicting Obama bowing to a Saudi Arabian royal and blaming him for rising gas prices.
The New York Times reports on how wealthy conservative activists tested these materials among various focus groups to see what would work best—though, as Rev. Sharpton pointed out, it's a strategy unlikely to win over any undecided voters with their conspiracy theories.