Obama 'fighting the smears'

So Obama has launched a website called "Fight the Smears" to try to dispel some of the dirty rumours floating around the blogosphere.

Tom Bevan (from RCP Blog) thinks:

This strikes me as a smart, innovative strategy for Obama - yet another example of how he's willing to shed conventional thinking, and also to use the Internet as a strength to offset one of the vulnerabilities of his campaign (ie. the circulation of rumors and misinformation).

Yeah, I understand the logic here but because this is actually a "paid for by Obama for America" site, I feel like there's going to a deafening silence when one of these dirty rumours turns out to be true.

However, Bevan also notes that:

The true risk to Obama in taking this approach is if he and his campaign, in the process of trying to debunk a rumor, make some sort of declaration on the website that turns out to be misleading or untrue. Should a mistake like that occur, the entire thing will blow up in their faces and they'll wish they had stuck with the old way of dealing with rumors, which is to deny them oxygen.

I absolutely agree with this, and I think it's fair to say that this is more of an issue for Obama than it is for any other candidate. A statement about the "whitey" video like "no such tape exists", is going to look awfully silly if indeed it does. And there in itself is the problem of setting up a mechanism to deal with rumours and hearsay, I've just gone and perpetuated it by wondering what would happen if a tape actually does exist.  So regardless of whether or not the rumour is true, it doesn't make it go away. Ironically, I hadn't thought much about the "whitey" video until I checked the site...I also didn't know about the hand-on-the-heart issue.

I suppose that's the danger of this idea -- some rumours (like conspiracy theories) don't ever seem to really go away; and by accumulating and listing them, you're actually informing people (perhaps previously unaware) of issues you'd rather have disappear. I didn't look at the pledge of allegiance thing and think "well, they took care of that issue", I thought, "one video of him reciting the pledge of allegiance with his hand on his heart doesn't necessarily imply an overarching sense of patriotism...and why is there no mention of his empty lapel? Isn't the flag pin issue also a rumour about his lack of patriotism?"

It's actually a classic problem of inductive logic and reasoning: you cannot disprove a rumour about patriotism with a video of somebody reciting the pledge of allegiance. While the video may support the conclusion, this kind of causal inference does not guarantee any level of truth, and thus does not fully remove doubt instilled by the rumour. So although, in principle, a website dedicated to dispelling rumours may be a clever and noble idea, in reality, proving rumours to be false is, in logical terms anyway, an incredibly difficult feat.