Thursday, May 03, 2007

Dumbass

He's got some time before I decide to support him or not, but so far Obama looks pretty good. But I just caught wind of a stupid error on his part. Stupid not because it will cause any serious harm but because it could have very easily been handled in a way where everyone wins. Here's what happened, a few years ago some guy set up a Barak Obama Myspace page. He was in contact with the campaign folks, even gave them access to edit things. Everything was hunky dorry until recently when his number of "friends" spiked to 160,000, not to shabby. Then the campaign realized that they have an outsider able to speak for a presidential candidate with instant access to as many people as most TV pundits. So they decided they needed to take control. Ok thats totally understandable from the campaigns perspective. The person who created the page understood too and simply wanted to be reimbursed for their efforts, to the tune of $39,000, plus expenses (up to 10K). Now the campaign folks do have a point in that this person had done it on their own as volunteer and shouldn't ask for money after the fact. But seriously this person did you a big favor, they ask for some money, why not? Obama's hardly strapped for cash at the moment with nearly 20 million on hand. A simple thank you for all your help we really appreciate everything you've done, but you can understand why we need to take control, here is $50,000, and thank you again. That would be a whopping one quarter of one hundredth of one percent of your budget. I bet they could have talked him down if they were all that concerned anyway.

Again this is too minor to matter, but seriously why would any campaign manager allow any ill will towards their candidate when it could be solved so easily. If this guy is that big a fan they probably could have just brought him into the campaign, have him as an internet liaison or something. Anyway this has no affect whatsoever on my views of him as a presidential candidate but it does affect my thoughts of the people running his campaign.

3 comments:

aMom2E said...

I am glad someone else heard about this... I saw a story about it and e-mailed my advisor and another comm prof about it to hear what they thought... I like how you presented both sides of the issue and then gave your thoughts on the matter. Good job of being open and honest while still presenting information. I see a little bit of journalistic style there!

Ron said...

This slightly affects my opinion of Obama. His representers represent him. Dude needs to be reimbursed. Period. I have a feeling this won't go away quickly.

Kilgore Trout said...

Dude also volunteered to do it with zero expectation for reward. He doesn't NEED to be reimbursed, but it would be the right thing to do. And in my opinion it would be the smart thing to do.

In an era where warrantless wire taping hardly makes a ripple I would be shocked if this causes a major stir, then again illegal wire tapping was a repub, and not paying a myspace volunteer was a Dem, and a black dem running for president. Your probably right, this won't go away.

I could see the campaign being against payment on principle, so that in the future we don't have opportunists scooping up the myspace page for every politician and then expecting to get paid. I'm not saying thats what this guy did, I'm saying its a reason they might want to avoid setting that precedent.