This hasn’t spread widely beyond Net-oriented media yet, but the independently-created Barack Obama MySpace page was taken away by the official Obama campaign from the man who built it — and who pumped it up to over 160,000 friends. The guy seems to have cooperated with the official campaigners all the way, right up until they wanted to control the page themselves. He then asked them to hire him as a consultant (which would have been a damn smart move, since he was a proven, loyal online community builder). Instead, the Obama folks asked him how much he’d take as a one-time payment. He told them. They decided it was too much and, instead of negotiating, got MySpace to give them control of the URL.

Now myspace.com/BarackObama is a typically bland, consultant-style campaign site with just over 1/10 the number of friends the original had.

Not everyone who has heard about this feels that volunteer Joe Anthony is in the right (as this Slashdot discussion makes clear), but I think the way the Obama campaign handled the situation is somewhere between tacky and moronic.

This is the kind of behavior you expect from an old-line politician surrounded by cigar-chompers, not from someone who touts himself as new and different. It’s old-fashioned, top-down, consultant-controlled, pre-Web nonsense, the kind that tells sincere volunteers they shouldn’t bother to help the candidate unless they check with headquarters first. Except Joe Anthony *did* check with headquarters, and they approved of what he was doing until both his efforts and the campaign got big-time, which meant that a small-time dude like him suddenly wasn’t the right guy to run what *he* had created!

Suddenly I have no desire to volunteer for Obama, and I suspect that a lot of other people are experiencing a similarly sudden non-desire to help him. Millions in the bank…. professional campaigners… I guess Obama no longer needs us ordinary people.

Apparently my hope that Obama was smarter than and different from the same-old same-old candidates was naive.

Oh, well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.