The most pressing question in this presidential campaign has become: Why isn’t the Obama campaign (or their surrogates and sympathizers) spreading insidious rumors about John McCain to counterbalance all the junk out there about Obama?

Now, I subscribe to plenty of liberal/lefty e-mail lists — so I feel fairly in touch with the viral pulse out there.  And I know plenty of Obama sympathizers will say that they’re working very hard at getting out the unknown stuff about John McCain.

But my response to them would be that you’re still hampered by this ridiculous need to stay in the realm of truth.

For example, Brave New Films has done a great job of exposing “The Real John McCain.”  In their latest salvo, they reveal that McCain, in fact, is the true elitist.  He and his wife own, among other things, ten mansions:

Others are exposing McCain’s elitism as well.  Isabel Wilkinson over at Huffington Post has noted that McCain has been wearing $520 Ferragamo loafers while campaigning this summer, which, in turn, has produced more fodder for BagnewsNotes, who continues to show how contrasting visual images of an angry and out-of-touch McCain and a genial and engaged Obama tell the true story of each man.

Unfortunately, though McCain’s elitist hypocrisy might scandalize many of us, it doesn’t come across as a threat to the American way of life.  That’s because old, rich white men have always held power in this country.  Strangely, it’s not news — both to the man in the street and the Man in the media.

The only shocking revelation you can provide about an old, rich white man, as McCain himself knows, is somehow to intimately tie him to the more truly threatening segments of the population — through, let’s say, miscegenation.

But I’m not sure even that type of smear campaign would work this year.  That’s because McCain and the media have effectively made this election a referendum on American fear — and in this experiment, for all his incompetence and disingenuousness, McCain is the control factor.

The funny thing is that the Democrats were ready to fight fear-mongering, but they were fighting the last war.  Despite continuing international instability and talk of a “national security gap” between the candidates, McCain and the media has decided to go old-school and foment fear of a more traditional, domestic kind.

I must say I consider myself partially guilty here.  During the primary season (and even before), I was telling anyone who would listen that race would dominate the narratives of this campaign if Obama won the primary.

But once the Democratic primary ended, I lost a little perspective and began to talk about Obama transcending that well-worn yet persistent American nightmare.

Personally, I blame the fist pump.

The racial (and closely related religious) narrative is alive and well, though, and being exploited for all its worth.  How else to explain the power of  McCain’s latest internet-only ad positing Obama as the Anti-Christ?

More importantly, how to explain that McCain’s campaign gets away with it by calling it a joke?  And how to explain that CNN actually gives it a fairly lengthy (and incredibly irresponsible) treatment?

Well, let me end this with some required viewing — a lengthy dissection of “ObamaPhobia” by Michael Shaw, the mind behind BagnewsNotes. It’s from a recent conference presentation he gave, and it provides a somber reminder of how far America has to go and if we want change now, how hard we have to work: