Oops.
The Barack Obama campaign said it had nothing to do with the Orwellian YouTube ad against Hillary Clinton that appeared on YouTube in recent days, but it turns out the creator of the ad "is a Democratic operative who worked for a digital consulting firm with ties to rival Sen. Barack Obama," reports the AP based on a report at HuffingtonPost.com.
Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that he was the creator of the video, which portrayed Clinton as a Big Brother figure and urged support for Obama's presidential campaign. De Vellis, 33, said he resigned from the firm on Wednesday after he learned that he was about to be unmasked by the HuffingtonPost.com., a liberal news and opinion Internet site.
Blue State designed Obama's Web site and one of the firm's founding members, Joe Rospars, took a leave from the company to work as Obama's director of new media. The connection to the campaign is likely to be a setback for Obama, who has cultivated an image as politician who wants to rise above bare-knuckle politics.
De Vellis said he did it on his own time and the Obama campaign had nothing to do with it.
Still, bet on blowback for Barack...
Even if people believe Obama's campaign was hands-off on this one, the next attack via YouTube will generate inevitable questions and suspicion, which the Obama campaign will have to spend time answering.
Drip, drip, drip.
"This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed," De Vellis said. And he's right.
Best advice for Republicans trying to learn from this: Know thy consultants - and what they're up to in their spare time. And $trongly $uggest they don't pull a stunt like this.
Easy-to-use distributed digital technology that made such grassroots productions possible also empowered HuffPo's community to smoke out the perpetrator. That's why no campaign should try to do stuff like this and expect it to remain plausibly deniable forever.
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