The American Mind

An anti-semitic weblog post was spotted on the My.BarackObama.com, the user-generated area of the campaign website. Electricity crackled through the conservative blogosphere upon the news. Too bad the analysis was wrong.

What John Hinderaker fails to convey because he’s too concerned about his hit job is Marxists/Socialists/Communists for Obama isn’t an official part of the campaign. My.BarackObama.com is a social network where supporters build profiles, weblogs, and online communities without guidance from the campaign. The campaign merely provides the tools and the web space. Anytime an open content platform is build there’s the potential for abuse and embarrassment. That’s what happened here. The Obama campaign did the correct thing and removed the post.

It would be analogous to someone putting some racist drivel on Redstate or the Power Line forums. Once the offending material was discovered it would be removed.

Even Glenn Reynolds got it wrong:

But the Kos-style open diary thing seems like a highly unwise approach for a Presidential campaign, even one that expects Big Media outfits to protect them on issues like this, as isn’t done for others.

I really don’t think Glenn would prefer a boring, uninviting website to the vibrant online community the Obama campaign has grown. Obama is successfully using the internet to take advantage of his passionate supporters. When I worked on Fred Thompson’s eCampaign I would have killed for an online platform like Obama’s and energized supporters talking and organizing with each other and making content. Dealing with objectionable material would be a nice problem to have.

This story isn’t a big deal and in fact distracts online conservatives from what the Obama campaign is doing. Patrick Ruffini writes,

Stories like this win tactical, one-day skirmishes but lose us the broader war. The damage to the Obama campaign will last 24-48 hours, and by then we’ll have moved on to the next line of attack. But in the meantime, thousands more people will sign up to My.BarackObama.com. They’ll form groups, RSVP to events, and yes, maybe write an off-color blogpost or two. They’ll solidify their commitment to a community that’s fanatically dedicated to electing Barack Obama president. And while the pundit-blogosphere may dismiss them, the people on MyBO are building the most fearsome volunteer organization in the history of Presidential politics.

The old school consultants will take heart in the blog feeding frenzy, and feel vindicated in their decision to run a play-it-safe, Web 1.0 campaign. So they’ll use the clips from this to veto open systems and user generated content on candidate websites. And a few months later, they’ll wonder why their website is so lame and why they’re getting clobbered by the Democrats online.

This is not the first user-generated content scandal on MyBO (see here and here), and it won’t be the last.

Each time, the blogosphere could take pleasure in getting its scalp. But what’s happened after each of these incidents? Has the Obama online operation been weakened? No. They keep growing bigger and bigger and bigger. And by continually harping on stuff like this, you’re teaching our people to build lame one-way sites that don’t raise any money or generate any activism.