After covering politics for several years I can understand the fear of the control-oriented, often manic, seasoned “professional” campaign staff when an independent fan of a candidate can attract support - while operating outside their control.
But this is the New Normal world, dedicated to the ” power of us” so there will continue to be bumps and even collisions along the way in this campaign frontier. There sure were earlier this week when Barack Obama’s paid staff tangled with one of his biggest and most successful grassroots supporters, Joe Anthony.
After seeing Obama give that memorable speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Anthony became an active volunteer. Most notably he created a MySpace profile for Obama that attracted a whopping 160,000 friends. The paid politicos were increasingly uncomfortable with Anthony’s role as an “unofficial spokesman” – the unavoidable consequence of having a site in the web 2.0 world. So, fearing lack of control, the staffers took over the site.
So what’s happened? As of today, under this professional campaign, supervision, Obama’s number of friends on the site has slid down to 21,100 friends.
Hard lesson to learn, especially with the old and new media's inevitable coverage of our most youthful and ostensibly modern candidate’s handling of the new media that was created for him.
Wrote Anthony on his blog, "It'll take time for me to work this out and decide if I will personally continue to support Obama, regardless of how I feel about his campaign's handling of this situation.”
