Nicholas Kristof has a worthwhile piece in today’s NYT about the bigotry surrounding Obama. Kristof puts these recent events into a historical context noting that racist smears seem to be one of America’s favorite pastimes. On race:

There is a parallel with presidential campaigns in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when one of the most common ways to attack a candidate was to suggest that he was partly black, or at least favored racial intermarriage. For example, the Federalists charged that Thomas Jefferson was “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” And the word “miscegenation” was coined in 1863 and 1864 in charges that Abraham Lincoln secretly plotted for blacks to marry whites, especially Irish-Americans. As late as the 1920 presidential campaign, a quarter-million letters were sent to voters accusing Warren Harding of being descended from a “West Indian Negro. … May God save America from international shame and domestic ruin.”