Here's one difference between Barack Obama's campaign and John Kerry's. It took Kerry 15 days to respond to the swift-boat veterans, and even when it did respond it did so in a mealy-mouthed and girly-man sort of way.
Now, two days after Corsi got front-page New York Times treatment, the Obama campaign has issued a lengthy, point-by-point refutation of dozens of Corsi inaccuracies and false allegations. I read a .pdf that I can't link to, but Media Matters has a summary here, and I'm sure you can find the whole thing easily enough.
It's too early to say for sure, but I'm guessing we'll see that the simple fact of aggressive push back will really diminish Corsi's impact here. Kerry let the story fester, and so the story was "Is John Kerry really a hero?" for two weeks. Team Obama has now changed the media story line from "Is Barack Obama a Muslim stalking horse etc.?" to "Controversial author getting blasted." That's a decent day's work.
