Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

The Barack Obama campaign's underhanded seizure of a very popular MySpace page created by a pro-Obama volunteer has indeed hit the big media, including the AP wire, and Obama isn't looking very good. The Chicago Tribune reports on the incident, while Jim Geraghty at National Review gives some advice. Geraghty:

What to make of all this? Obviously, some ordinary folks are more fluent in these emerging technologies than many campaign professionals, and that these gung-ho tech-heads are going to be the first to utilize them. The next great get-out-the-vote tool is probably being tweaked far from the headquarters of a major campaign by some guy in a makeshift home office, while his mother or spouse yells at him for spending all his waking hours on the Internet.

Here's the Google News search on the story.

For what it's worth, here's my take on the story and what the Barack Obama campaign should have done: Ask the creator of the MySpace page to post a prominent notice that the page is unoffocial and not connected to the campaign, monitor the page for factual inaccuracies and email the creator with corrections, but otherwise just leave it alone. Let the grassroots site grow naturally without campaign interference. Doing what the campaign did merely serves to alienate potentially tens of thousands of supporters, create bad media coverage and portray Barack as clueless about the Internet-connected grassroots world he is operating in.

Left basically untouched by the campaign, the Barack Obama MySpace page would have grown - or dwindled - as a direct reflection of Obama's support in the young, Internet-savvy demographic, giving the campaign a near real-time indicator of what messages were resonating, and which were not.

Not anymore.