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Dr. Steven Kraus
One prominent Western Iowa supporter of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama says he thinks misleading chain emails and rumor mongering are eroding his candidate’s support among older voters.
“Even though John McCain doesn’t know how to use an email other people his age do,†said Dr. Steven Kraus, founder and president of Future Health, Inc. in Carroll.
Kraus, who sat next to the Obamas at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner weeks before the Iowa Caucuses and served as the presidential candidate’s co-chair for Carroll County during that process, says emails falsely referring to Obama as a Muslim are having an effect with older voters he talks to in rural Iowa.
“They’re working,†he said of the emails. “Most Americans are not diving into the campaign to research the issues.â€
In an interview with Iowa Independent before an Obama rural roundtable event in downtown Carroll, Kraus, a long-time chiropractor who now runs a company specializing in electronic medical record-keeping, said the dynamic he sees with older voters is this: Judy Smith receives an email from a relative, say a nephew, with scurrilous charges about Obama’s “Muslim ties.” She passes it on to friends who give the email credibility because they see it as coming from Judy — their friend at coffee — not from the nebulous and/or nefarious original source.
Older voters who had been with Obama are being made uneasy by the content of the emails, Kraus said.
“They’re highly questionable now because of some of these lies and falsehoods,†Kraus said.
Older Internet users generally don’t have as sophisticated an understanding of the medium as the millienials or Gen Xers Obama is reaching. Anyone who has received silly forwarded jokes from an older parent knows this.
“That’s what I’m talking about,†Kraus said. “These chains of spiritual messages, these jokes.â€
Somehow, charges and false statements about Obama — a committed Christian — have made their way into this network, Kraus said.
Time Magazine reports that some of the chain emails allege the ridiculous.
One chain e-mail claims that the Antichrist was prophesied to be “A man in his 40s of MUSLIM descent,” which would indeed sound ominous if not for the fact that the Book of Revelation was written at least 400 years before the birth of Islam.
Kraus is worried the Obama campaign is not doing enough to reach older voters on the Net, and that this dynamic could prove decisive with voters who will head to the polls with incorrect information.
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