But Obama has also inspired tens of millions of Americans with a powerful and historic campaign. After eight years of Bush and widespread disillusionment with Republican governance, could Obama’s inability to pull away from John McCain really come down to his skin color?

For three months during this summer and early fall, I’ve been traveling across America, exploring the nation’s small towns and rural areas and meeting the people there. From Michigan to New Mexico to North Carolina, I’ve conducted dozens of interviews with white working-class voters across 18 states, gauging, among other things, their thoughts and feelings about the first black man to have a serious shot at winning the White House. Beyond Obama’s race, what I found was a more complicated set of concerns — whether accurately informed or not — about his religious faith, values and cultural and educational background. That is, many of these white rural voters expressed a discomfort that may have more to do with unfamiliarity about the type of person Barack Obama is, rather than with direct concerns about his race.

Although I encountered a scattering of openly racist views, they were among a small minority. (These voters would probably never vote for a Democrat for president anyway.) Many voters dismissed the notion that hesitancy about Obama is due to his race.

“Obama isn’t even really black — Bill Clinton is more black than Obama,” said Mike Wallace, 44, of Dearborn, Mich. Wallace is a United Auto Workers pipe fitter who plans to vote for McCain, although he believes the vast majority of his co-workers at the local Chrysler plant will vote for Obama, as recommended by a UAW handout. Some voters revealed support for Obama even in blunt terms that seemed to run against their racial preferences. “I’m not a fan of the blacks,” explained Dennis Rodriguez, 48, a restaurant manager from Manistique, Mich., “but I just think Obama is the right man for the job.” Bob Morin, 53, a custodian and swing voter from Cubero, N.M. (a state Bush won by just 5,000 votes in 2004), told me, “I’ve got a few friends who say, ‘There’s no way I’m voting for a black guy,’ but I think most people have gotten over it.”

So why hasn’t Obama gained better traction outside the big cities?

“He’s just not someone I can personally relate to,” explained Cathy Massingale, 33, of Cullowhee, N.C., a Democrat who first supported John Edwards this election, and then Hillary Clinton. “Obama just doesn’t feel like someone who knows me.” Massingale’s husband is in the military, and she wants to see a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But she said she remains undecided about Obama or McCain.

It may be that hesitancy about Obama stems from his being a type of black person that rural Americans are unfamiliar with. White rural Americans tend to identify two types of black Americans. They know local, churchgoing black people who like to hunt and fish, whose lives are similar to their own. On the other hand, they tend to think of urban blacks as a stereotype seen widely in pop culture (bling-wearing gangstas) or as the kind of black people they see on local TV news (often criminal suspects or convicts). Obama fits neither of these tropes, as a highly educated, upper-middle-class, self-made urban black man. (One with lighter skin and of mixed race, to boot.) He’s not foreign because he’s black, he’s foreign because he’s unknown — especially as someone seeking a job held exclusively by white men for more than two centuries.

“Obama’s like Jesse Jackson — what does he know except a bunch of cities with lots of blacks?” asked 60-year-old construction worker Louie, in White Branch, Mich., a lifelong Democrat who said he probably won’t vote for either candidate this year.

In the quaint and tidy town of Yellville, Ark., Cassie Gilley, 48, a soft-spoken school administrator, explained her view of white, rural America’s evolving relationship to race. “There’s a difference between racist and prejudiced,” she said over sandwiches at Subway, after a service at Yellville’s First Baptist Church. “A lot of people around here just haven’t spent much time with black people. When they get to know a black person, it’s OK. But they will bring their prejudice in at first.”

In overcoming that formidable hurdle, the many lingering rumors, myths and paranoid fears that dog Obama’s campaign make the task especially challenging.

Just outside of Cranks, Ky., in Harlan County, Mack Middleton is a retired coal miner and a die-hard union man — a United Mine Workers bumper sticker adorns his Dodge van — but he is also a swing voter who voted both for Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. This year, Middleton, 62, and his wife, Janice, 57, aren’t sure if they are going to vote at all.

“Obama, he’s not our kind of people,” said Middleton in a gruff, bitten-off speaking style, taking a break from canning green beans at the couple’s double-wide mobile home. “He don’t believe in the hereafter, and the Lord, the way I look at it … he’s Muslim.”

Several people, from Michigan to Alabama, referred to an insidious picture circulating on the Internet of Obama wearing a white head-wrap and a robe next to a photo of Osama bin Laden in similar dress, with the caption, “What’s the difference between Osama and Obama? Just a little B.S.” According to a survey in July by the Pew Research Center, 12 percent of Americans still believed Obama was a Muslim — even after the long Democratic primary battle that was covered heavily in the national media. Among rural Americans, 19 percent still believed he was a Muslim.

In Logan, W.Va., abandoned brick storefronts haunt downtown while the Fountain Plaza mall, anchored by a Wal-Mart Supercenter, gleams on the hill above town. Logan County was one of a few counties that voted for John Kerry in 2004 (George W. Bush won West Virginia overall), and, given a struggling economy, would seem primed to swing Democratic again. But Scott, 26, a former trucker currently unemployed, isn’t going to vote for Obama. “I know it sounds stupid,” he says taking a long drag from his Maverick cigarette, “but Barack Hussein Obama? And if he gets in, somebody’ll take him out real quick,” he said, referring to potential assassination, which was a surprisingly common theme along rural back roads.

The seemingly endless list of falsehoods about Obama — that he took his oath of office on the Quran, that he doesn’t salute the flag, that he refuses to wear an American flag lapel pin — could be interpreted as excuses for being uncomfortable with his race.

But class matters too, in regions like Appalachia, where Obama had a particularly tough time winning votes in the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton.

Inez, Ky., is a town that epitomizes the Democratic Party’s decline from its peak of power in the 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson once stood on a porch in the impoverished town in the heart of Appalachia and declared a War on Poverty. Today in Inez, population 600, consumption of pain pills is a popular pastime, and the poverty rate hovers around 37 percent, three times the national average. In April of this year John McCain gave a speech in Inez, detailing the failures of welfare, to a receptive audience. In 2004, Martin County, of which Inez is the seat, voted for George W. Bush by a 2-to-1 ratio. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Robert Duncan, lives in Inez.

Gary Ball, a former coal miner and editor of the firebrand Mountain Citizen newspaper that is published in Inez, points to an authenticity gap for Obama. “People around here see Obama as being privileged,” he said. Never mind McCain — with his seven houses — or recent blue blood candidates George W. Bush, John Kerry and Al Gore. “We know Obama’s plenty book-smart … but I liked Harry Truman, the last president to have a simple high school education.”

While George W. Bush received the same Harvard benediction as Obama, Bush never identified as an intellectual. Obama’s modest, single-mom upbringing does not overcome his evident intellectualism, according to Ball; for rural whites, he says, Obama remains on the losing end of this authenticity test.

Sarah Palin’s biography, of course, raises the stakes. Touting her moose-hunting, snowmobile-riding, small-town sensibility, Palin turned a convention of restless delegates into an explosion of camp revival energy, shifting the momentum of the race John McCain’s way. It is obvious that rural, working-class whites are more comfortable with the conservative small-town Palin, to whom they can relate.

Beyond the necessity of connecting with rural America, the Obama campaign is hoping to gain ground by winning over suburban independents in battleground states. In Columbus, Ohio, I encountered several white, upper-middle-class swing voters who said they would support Obama. But Terry Daniels, 53, a black man who runs a clothing store in downtown Columbus catering to the city’s suburbanites, was skeptical that would happen. “Everyone likes to think they’re progressive,” Daniels said, “but when it comes down to it, they’re not going to vote that way.”

Even though the economy purports to be a top issue for voters, the 2008 race has been as much of a contest of personalities as any in recent memory. (Even before Palin entered the picture.) Obama’s fate in November may in part depend on his ability to better familiarize the more insular segments of white America with an under-reported but growing post-civil rights demographic: the well-educated black urban middle class. Obama’s story is a historic example of this achievement, but it remains to be seen if America is ready to celebrate it by granting him the nation’s highest office.

So Wallace, following a 92nd Street Y panel last night, said this:

“There will be pressure to elevate a woman but there will be an equal amount of pressure to pick someone who is prepared,” Wallace said.

And then she said this:

Wallace flagged one female official in particular who she thinks would be a good choice this year.

“Nikki Haley — she’s great,” she said. “She’s the most effective surrogate Romney has.”

If the Sarah Palin problem was a problem of preparation and vetting, Haley … might present some issues? Specifically an odd and mostly unsubstantiated sex scandal and also these rumors that she might at any moment be indicted on tax charges. The tax thing might be bullshit and the affair story was the product of a self-promoting creep but they’re “out there,” as they say.

More important, Haley has been governor of South Carolina since January of 2011. As in very slightly longer than one year. And slightly less time being a governor than Sarah Palin had in 2008. It’s almost as if Wallace is making a pick not based on the principle of Who Would Be Best For the Nation but on demographics and optics?

Wallace also apparently suggested Carly Fiorina, which, lol. Romney/Ex-CEO who famously received a giant golden parachute when she was forced out of her company 2012, everyone! Just the ticket for the new economy.

That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it’s unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well — remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it’s to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could’ve dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.

Instead, McCain has won the nomination three-and-a-half minutes into the film. Soon we’re watching Julianne Moore watch Tina Fey on TV. You remember the “SNL” sketches making fun of Palin, right? In case you don’t, “Game Change” airs lengthy chunks from most of them. It also has tons of actual footage from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, and it re-creates debates and speeches and the Couric interview and the Charlie Gibson interview and a bunch of other things you saw either live or on YouTube when they happened.

Moore’s performance is not just fair but maybe even flattering. (For one thing, she doesn’t hit those flat upper Midwest vowels as gratingly as the real Palin.) Woody Harrelson plays strategist Steve Schmidt — the film’s protagonist — as a grizzled, “too old for this shit” campaign veteran called back to the trail against his better judgment. Jamey Sheridan is given barely anything to do as Mark Salter, McCain’s “conscience.” Salter, the primary author of his “Maverick” mythos, is limited, after the Palin selection, to making a hilariously over-telegraphed face of concern as everyone else in the war room applauds her first speech.

But the film is about Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace because they were pretty clearly Halperin and Heilemann’s primary sources, and we watch them become horrified by the depths of Sarah Palin’s ignorance at exactly the same time as everyone else in America became horrified by her ignorance.

Because it’s Hollywood, there’s very little politics in the film’s depiction of politics. Policies are simply things for Sarah Palin to write on note cards and not memorize. Operatives confidently declare, in faux Sorkin-ese patter, that if this or that meaningless decision is made, it means “we’ll lose by five.”

There is a sheen of faux cynicism (McCain swears like a sailor!) but it masks complete naiveté: Everyone is basically honorable and decent. Nicolle Wallace — a member of the Bush administration communications team — is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of someone as dangerously ignorant as Sarah Palin in the White House. On election night, she breaks down in tears as she admits to Schmidt that … she didn’t vote. They embrace.

The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to “unfair” — Sarah Palin doesn’t know that the head of Great Britain’s government is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It’s an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to “the base” because of Palin’s heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn — “if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!” — after “winning” her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention. (Todd Palin barely does anything.)

The constant use of actual news footage adds a bit of verisimilitude but also constantly raises the question of why this lightly fictionalized version of the election actually needs to exist. “Game Change” is not really for serious political junkies, who remember all the stuff that did happen and will scoff at the stuff that didn’t. (At one point, John McCain answers his ringing iPhone in the middle of the night. He used a BlackBerry, HBO.) But if casually politically involved people want to see their assumptions about Sarah Palin reinforced, well, there are still those “SNL” sketches.

In the end, the Republican operatives who foisted Sarah Palin on an unprepared nation are rightly horrified that they created a monster, but at no point does anyone act concerned that their actual candidate was himself an angry, warmongering old crank with extremely fungible principles. Sure, Sarah Palin didn’t know what the Fed did. Do we have any proof John McCain knew what it should’ve done? Maybe everyone actually was totally unfair to poor Sarah Palin.

Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush’s first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything “political” in years. But Curl has been hearing things!

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Oh, a month-long tour in support of her book about her time in the Bush administration! She must be running for vice president, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan and George W. Bush.

There’s more. (And not just the part where Curl calls Rice “a spicy Rice dish” and waxes fetishistic about “her guns” being “a match for those of our first lady Michelle Obama.”)

Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.

Curl has so many inside scoops packed into this column! I had no idea that our first presidential running mate swap since Ford’s 1976 campaign was basically a foregone conclusion and not just a weird Beltway journalist fantasy! But yes, I can see why the still  un-chosen GOP candidate would definitely be looking pretty closely at Rice — who’s been strongly making the case for her selection by not explicitly denying interest in the position — in case Obama replaces Biden with Clinton, which he will surely do.

The column gets worse (“Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an ‘American black’”) but that’s not really important. What’s important is exploring how someone like Condoleezza Rice ends up a perennial name on the fantasy ticket list.

Rice has been a subject of these columns since 2005, when she became Bush’s second secretary of state, and the White House tasked communications operative Jim Wilkinson — previously known best for inventing the false story of Jessica Lynch* — with getting Rice (and her boss) some much-needed positive press. Wilkinson did his job beautifully (remember when Rice’s knee-high boots were a topic of actual serious news coverage for weeks?) and Rice began receiving the “rock star” treatment.

In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, author of the 2007 Rice bio “The Confidante,” summarized the exact moment of the birth of the presidential speculation:

In March 2005, before Rice sat for an interview with the Washington Times, Wilkinson slipped a note to the editorial page editor, Tony Blankley, suggesting that she be asked whether she would consider running for president. It was an audacious proposal — she had been secretary for only six weeks — but such speculation would bolster Rice’s image as a leader. (Wilkinson and Blankley said they do not recall the incident, but others present said they saw Wilkinson’s note.)

Oh, the Washington Times.

Shortly thereafter, Dick Morris wrote a book claiming — nay, insisting — that 2008 would be “Condi vs. Hillary.”

As Iraq descended into a violent civil war in 2006, Rice-for-president buzz bizarrely grew. There was enough of a false grass-roots movement for a paint-by-numbers AP trend piece with a silly nickname and everything. Tim Russert asked her point blank. As always, she said no in no uncertain terms.

Then, of course, everyone began to speculate that she’d be McCain’s running mate. Robert Novak claimed as much on Fox. Dan Senor said she was pushing for the pick on some Sunday show. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a Talk of the Town piece on the subject! McCain and Rice both finally denied “reports” that she was angling for the spot on the ticket.

Now, I guess, it’s time to start up the rumor mill anew.

But before you put pen to paper on that column about how a Gingrich-Rice ticket would surely win moderate women in Ohio, consider this: In addition to the fact that she’s always denied wanting the job, and in addition to the fact that she was an unmitigated failure in the Bush administration, downplaying terrorism as a priority prior to 9/11 and selling the public on the Iraq invasion with untruths, Condi Rice is pro-choice.

*Update: Jon Krakauer recently rescinded his claim that Wilkinson, then a communications aide to General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the initial false Washington Post report on Lynch’s apparent heroics before her capture. Though Wilkinson was obviously involved in the PR campaign surrounding Lynch’s rescue and return to the U.S., he apparently isn’t responsible for falsifying her actions or leaking that false story to the press.

The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.

(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)

Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:

This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.

If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)

Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.

A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!

Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.

Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?

How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.

I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.