Who's Space? Barack, the Grassroots, and MySpace

I’ve been thinking and saying that Obama has a “Wes Clark problem” brewing for a while now: an energized and independent grassroots base which is largely disengaged and disconnected from the official campaign. They were bound to come to loggerheads sooner or later (and probably will again), but this is just appalling. It shows a profound lack of aptitude from Obama’s team.

I have no doubt that many of the 160,000 will return, and that number will certainly be topped by Labor Day, if not sooner, as new myspacers join the fray, and I don’t think this event alone will really hurt Obama very badly in the short term. However, this sort of thing has a way of attaching stink to a campaign. They certainly lost Joe Anthony’s (rather valuable) support, and this will continue to have ripple effects.

This is the nut of the issue to me:

A Newsweek story noting that Anthony had some minor facts wrong about Obama’s biography made them nervous. And while he complied with every request they made about content on the site—keeping a prominent disclaimer stating that it was an unofficial page, removing a link to Obama’s Senate podcasts because it might be an FEC violation, culling a “friend” from a Larry Flynt profile page—they chafed nonetheless.

Coordination with a volunteer they had never met, who lived far from campaign HQ, and who controlled an asset of increasing value to their effort, was just not as seamless as they would like. Who knows who he is actually emailing, they worried. How do we know if the answers he is giving people are the right ones?

Basically, the campaign didn’t trust him, and things went downhill from there. They wanted the fruits of his labor, but no more of his labor, and he didn’t want to lose his baby. They offered to buy him out (instead of hiring him; why?) and he came up with a number that was below market-value for volunteer contacts (~30 cents a name is cheap in this biz) but more than they expected from “a volunteer.” It’s not pretty, but I’m sympathetic to Anthony here, having been in similar situations myself.

This really does put the notion that Obama’s campaign “gets it” in a questionable light. The notion seems to be that he should have felt privileged to serve the campaign by turning over a year of his life with little recognition and no continued involvement. Bullshit. This is typical top-down control-freak power politics, which is the antithesis of what they’re supposed to be all about. Actions are louder than words.

Joe Rospars, the New Media Director at Barack Obama’s campaign, [[http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/5/2/191954/1220#readmore|responds]]. And the “he said / he said” seems to be about the money. Anthony says that once the workload was untenable for a volunteer, he was asked by the campaign to suggest a dollar amount to compensate him. Rospars version of the story casts Anthony as the instigator, blocking the campaign’s access and then holding it for ransom (emphasis added):

Joe changed the password on the profile, and didn’t give us the new one, like he had done in the past. This changed the previous dynamic, and we could no longer access the profile at a moment’s notice if need be. We asked Joe what was needed to restore access, and subsequently we received the list of itemized financial requests that have been discussed elsewhere.

The “subsequently” smells a little fishy. As phrased in Rospars statement, Anthony sounds like he’s asking for cash, unbidden. But Rospars wouldn’t be lying if the campaign had asked Anthony for a number. By omitting that fact (if, as Anthony claims, it is a fact) makes Anthony sound like he’s trying to cash out (which is fair enough) in a pretty shady way (not so cool).