The Washington Post’s Colbert King compares Clinton strategist Mark Penn to white supremacists, frantic to prevent Barack Obama from being elected: Memo From a Poison Penn.

Say you find yourself seated on the train behind two white supremacists who are beside themselves over the possibility that Barack Obama could become America’s first black president.

They are so fired up, they fail to notice you.

The men are discussing the urgent need to derail Obama’s candidacy.

The obvious strategist of the two says that Obama’s defeat can be brought about by hitting him hard, where it hurts the most.

We’ve got to launch an attack, he declares, on Obama’s “lack of American roots.” Paint him as a guy with an exotic background who’s present in mainstream society but isn’t really a part of it.

He asserts, with a snicker, that Obama has “a very strong weakness.” We’ll drive home the argument, he says, that Obama’s “roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited.”

Just one problem with King’s overheated scenario; the real white supremacists are very much in favor of Barack Obama.

So you think the chorus of white hate groups is seething with rage that Barack Obama could become president? Think again.

Members of the knuckle-dragging set are taking a rosier view, judging by their Internet posts. They say the possibility of a biracial president is helping their recruitment efforts.

“It will be a beautiful day when the masses look at the paper and truly realize they have lost their own country,” according to one of the postings spotted by Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “White people aren’t going to do a thing until their toys are taken away from them,” says another. “So things have to be worse for things to be better.”

So much for the question of whether Obama will be able to reach beyond his core liberal constituency.

Even former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has taken time from his international network of Holocaust-deniers to blog: “Obama is a visual aid for white Americans who just don’t get it yet that we have lost control of our country, and unless we get it back we are heading for complete annihilation as a people.”