Obama's new website, fightthesmears.com promises to put to rest negative rumors and false allegations. I've read all of the website's "Truth" responses to all of the allegations listed, and I'm not impressed. When I put myself in the shoes of the swing voters on whom we should be focussing, I feel slimed a bit. For this and other reasons listed below, I recommend that Obama do what I've suggested in my TPM post, "An Exhaustive Expert Questioning of Obama."

The source of the truthiness on his new weibsite is itself a major problem. Who can trust a polititician, much less his staff? Nevermind that a video shows the gradeschool in Indonesia he attended, interviews a teacher from that school and a former classmate. Nevermind that Obama's filmaker convincingly portrays the school as secular, involving kids of various faiths. How do we know that Obama wasn't sneaking off by himself to a radical wing of the school's population? Maybe the interviewees are paid actors. More importantly, how can we get answers to the questions that the website begs? So far, there's no way. The website doesn't provide the opportunity for questions and comments. It's a typical political diatribe against critics.

Another problem with Fightthesmears.com is that it's unlikely that swing voters will visit it. I'm a politics junkie, as was the TPM blogger who recommended the site. We dive in. But the sort of swing voters I have in mind are deluded by rumors and false allegations precisely because they don't have the inclination to explore the web in search of the truth. They get their information from TV and, perhaps, newspapers.

For all of these reasons, I think Obama should pursue the much more effective strategy I recommend in "An Exhaustive Expert Questioning of Obama." In that post, I recommend that he should do as he has done twice before. He should submit to an open-ended, public interrogation, nay a trial, by a large group of journalists and other high-profile community representatives. Their verdict has been and will be much more compelling than his own staff's responses to criticisms. And such public trials can attract the interest of broadcasters.