Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

Jay Bush comments on some heavy-handed tactics by the Barack Obama campaign involving MySpace, the popular social-networking website.

Barack Obama's presidential campaign convinced MySpace (owned by NewsCorp) to shut down an independent unofficial MySpace page in his honor, without the consent of its owner. Traffic from site is now automatically redirected to Obama's official MySpace page. It's good to see free speech is alive and well in the Democratic party........

What a blunder. What a stupid, stupid blunder. Campaigns ought to encourage the growth of MySpace networks that favor their candidate, not try to squelch them and steal their traffic. Barack, you're not trying to win the race for most web hits, you're trying to win the race for votes, and you don't do the latter by stomping on the little people who like you.

Micah L. Sifry at TechPresident.com has the complete story - the details of which make Barack Obama's campaign look even worse.

The original creator of the MySpace page, which gathered more than 160,000 MySpace "friends of" Barack Obama, Los Angeles paralegal Joe Anthony, notes the irony of the situation:

"The same campaign that inspired me to work so hard to build this community, the same campaign whose underlying message stresses "the power of the individual to have an impact on politics", was constantly downplaying my role in this, bullying me, and a couple of other things that were just rotten and dishonest."

Apparently the message here is, as an individual, if you have too big of an impact, you're just a liability. This is how Obama lost my vote, and one of his strongest supporters.

Memo to Republican candidates: Let a thousand flowers bloom in the blogosphere and across the Internet on YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, etc. Don't try to co-opt them or control them. Have contact with them, yes. Converse with them, yes. Put them on your email list, and answer their emails, yes - but never, never, ever don't do what the Obama campaign did to Joe Anthony.

Update: Ben Smith at The Politico rounds up the reaction from the left side of the blogosphere. Short version: they're made at Obama.

Wow, are the well-known bloggers mad at the Obama campaign for -- as they see it -- taking advantage of, and then dumping, the guy who created his MySpace page, Joe Anthony.

Markos says that, er, defecating "on your biggest supporters is generaly not a wise thing to do."

The MyDD crowd grumbles.

Atrios also not happy.

And Technorati has an endless list of smaller bloggers who are clearly upset. This does seem to have struck a chord with Internet denizens -- not, I suspect, with ordinary MySpace users; but with the smaller world of online activists who have been doing a lot of unpaid work for candidates, and particularly for Obama.

Smith says the blunder has its roots in a prior bad decision by the Obama campaign vis a vis MySpace: "It's worth keeping in mind that the Obama campaign got themselves into this situation by deciding to make Anthony's unofficial page the official page for the purposes of MySpace's own Impact Channel."