Democrat Barack Obama is fighting back against cyber attacks and innuendo with a Web site that seeks to debunk Net rumors, most notably a claim his wife used a racial epithet during a church talk and assertions that he is a Muslim.

Obama, who is the first African-American to win a major party’s nomination for the White House, faces problems new to U.S. presidential politics in a country burdened with a history of racism.

The World Wide Web move is an strange one in American politics, where candidates routinely disregard fabricated negative stories about them — unless they reach a boil — rather than risk giving them more publicity with explanations or denials.

The Obama campaign arised to be trying to get out front of a flurry of expected attacks from Republican-allied nonprofit groups, known as 527s after the section of the U.S. tax cipher that governs them, that can raise unlimited amounts of money for television ads not

controlled by campaigns.

Such groups did heavy damage to the 2004 presidential bid of Democrat Sen. John Kerry by questioning his military service in Vietnam and denouncing his criticism of the war when he returned home.

Both Obama and Republican John McCain are running on pledges of changing the highly partisan atmosphere in Washington that has frequently slipped into gutter politics. On Friday, Obama was campaigning in Columbus, Ohio, while McCain was holding a town hall-style meeting in New Jersey.

The top item on the new Obama site, http://www.fightthesmears.com, which was inaugurated Thursday, denies a persistent claim that Obama’s wife, Michelle, used the word “whitey” in a talk she once gave at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

The Obamas recently resigned from the congregation after it became a repeated source of embarrassment for the campaign, beginning with revelations of inflammatory remarks by Rev. Jeremiah Wright during his…

Orginal post by Top Tech News