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 Internet move is an unusual one in American politics, where candidates routinely ignore fabricated negative stories about them — unless they reach a boil — rather than risk giving them more publicity with explanations or denials.

The Obama campaign appeared 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 code 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.

The top item on the new Obama site, 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 site also rebutted claims that Obama is a Muslim, that he attended a radical Islamic primary school when living in Indonesia and that he took the Senate oath on a Quran, the Muslim holy book.

The Web posting says the truth is “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.”

The Web site also attacks allegations that his writings on race and religion are radical, saying that quotes from his book used in an e-mail “are alterations, deliberate manipulations, and in one case, an outright fabrication.”

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