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

Much of the knuckle-dragging set takes a rosier view, judging by their Internet posts. They say the possibility of a biracial president already is helping their recruitment.

“It will be a beautiful day when the masses look at the paper and truly realize they have lost their own country,” says 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 would 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.”

Mercy. Can’t we all get along?

Of course, the hater horde might be expressing their odd support for Obama in order to avoid receiving visits by the Secret Service.

Either way, their rhetoric is rife with pitiful themes of anger, fear and resentment – the three basic food groups of paranoid movements.

Obama has a bigger immediate headache than Duke and his allied dimwits. A chorus of anti-Obama attack books is rising and they don’t always let truth get in the way of a good hatchet job.

Leading the pack is “Obama Nation” by Jerome R. Corsi. It leads the New York Times Best-Seller List, helped along by bulk orders from conservative book clubs.

Corsi’s portrayal of Obama as a closet Muslim and black activist drug-user is intended to do what his earlier hit-job book “Unfit for Command” did to Sen. John Kerry, the last Democratic nominee.

Corsi’s not a hater, he says, but he’s known to make hateful statements. Among those for which he has apologized, he has called Islam “a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion.” He also has observed, “Boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.”

And his book is peppered unapologetically with innuendo, distortions and outright lies. It also has double-meaning statements like, “The sexual attraction of his mother to her African husband jumps out from the page.”

For fairness and balance, check out the liberal Media Matters for America Web site or the Obama campaign’s 40-page rebuttal to the “bigoted fringe” author at his campaign’s new Web site, “Unfit for Publication.”

Kerry failed to respond for more than two weeks to Corsi’s book or the attack ads that followed. Obama’s team responded within 24 hours of a page-one New York Times story about “Obama Nation.” Who knows how much good it will do? People who want to believe Obama’s a secret Muslim or some other urban legend are hardly going to let inconvenient facts get in the way. Still, he has to respond and put his faith in the voters to be fair. That may not offer much consolation, but it’s what elections are really all about.

What do the hate groups and “Swift Books,” as one publisher calls attack books, have in common? A running theme of paranoia – fears that go beyond a rational basis.

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” wrote historian Richard J. Hofstadter in the beginning of his now-classic 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

“I call it the paranoid style,” he wrote, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Forty-four years later, Hofstadter’s political “arena” looks more than ever like a mud-wrestling pit.

News that the Census Bureau predicts that non-Hispanic white Americans will become a minority in the nation’s population by 2042 – earlier than previous expected – adds fuel to some people’s fears. Yet California, to cite one diverse example, has been a majority-nonwhite state since the late 1990s without falling into the sea.

Despite our occasional conflicts, Americans are remarkably versatile at assimilating newcomers who are willing to work hard, earn their way up and even take leadership positions.

The prospect that Obama might prove the durability of that American dream excites many Americans and irritates some others. Other issues aside, an Obama win would show that America is not as racist as many black extremists believe it to be – or as many white extremists wish it were.