You have to hand it to the Obama administration when it comes to
consistency: Its players are singularly skilled when it comes to
refusing to learn from their own failures. No, I’m not talking
about their
cult-like belief in “green jobs” despite a mountain of evidence
that those jobs only exist when taxpayers are forced to incinerate
money to subsidize them. (Actually, that’s an interesting thought:
Could we end up generating more power for the nation if, instead of
giving half a billion dollars to a solar panel company, we just
burned five hundred million one dollar bills? But I digress…)
And I’m not talking about Obama’s latest stimulus plan.
Oops, we can’t say “stimulus” anymore; it’s a “jobs” plan, despite
every similar policy of this president having failed spectacularly
to produce a job. (Don’t forget, however, to be eternally thankful
for “jobs saved.”)
The newest and simultaneously funny and frightening Obama
reprise is the launch of an Obama campaign website called AttackWatch.com, designed to “Get
the facts (and) Fight the smears.” According to
ABC News, “Obama for America national field director Jeremy
Bird said the site offers ‘new resources to fight back,’ including
policy issue pages that fact check statements by Obama’s Republican
opponents with links to ‘evidence’ to back them up.”
Before getting to the early reaction to AttackWatch.com, a
little history is in order:
In June, 2008, the Obama campaign launched a website —
which you can still see today, although it hasn’t been noticeably
updated since the election — called Fight the Smears. (It should
be no surprise that the SEIU has a web page
with precisely the same title.) It used paid bloggers to do such
things as explain
to taxpayers that “a recent email smear falsely claims Michelle
ordered room service, but she never even stayed at the hotel.” If
only Michelle were still
so careful with taxpayers’ money!
As could be expected, left-leaning bloggers suggested the
site was a success while conservatives said it was a failure. Most
likely, the site was preaching to the choir, with little impact on
the national debate. Nevertheless, this was the Obama campaign’s
last overt web-based propaganda maneuver that could have been
considered even close to a success.
On August 4, 2009, in order to counter “disinformation
about health insurance reform,” the White House created an e-mail
address asking Americans to use it to inform on their friends and
neighbors: “If you get an email or see something on the web about
health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”
There was the predictable and justifiable response from
civil libertarians and those of us who were around during the Nixon
administration wondering whether the administration was collecting
names for a new version of an Enemies List. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)
called it the “Obama monitoring program” and wrote in a letter to
the president, “I can only imagine the level of justifiable outrage
had your predecessor asked Americans to forward e-mails critical of
his policies to the White House.”
On August 17, 2009, less than two weeks after this e-mail
snitching program was announced, and after the White House was
further criticized for sending out “spam” e-mails to many
Americans, flag@whitehouse.gov was
unceremoniously shut down.
Obama’s Director of New Media Macon Phillips, the same
gentleman who announced
the beginning of the snitch-on-your-neighbor program, noted
an “ironic development” from the administration’s propaganda
efforts: those efforts themselves “(have) become the target of
fear-mongering and online rumors…”
And that brings us to 2011 and the latest example of
Obama’s “fatal conceit,” that if something failed in the past it
just needs to be done bigger to succeed. And so is unleashed on
unsuspecting Americans the AttackWatch.com website as well
as a Twitter “hash tag” (#AttackWatch) for the nation’s many
“tweeters” to use to report naughty conservatives to the
government.
If there has ever been a more spectacular failure of a
propaganda campaign in such a short time, I am unaware of
it.
It doesn’t help the Administration’s efforts that while
Fight the Smears had the look and feel of a campaign website, the
new AttackWatch site is a foreboding black and red, looking like
something Che Guevara or V.I. Lenin would approve. The site is an
unwitting parody of itself.
The pictures on the main page are of Rick Perry (from
shoulders upward) and three smaller pictures of the mouths (and
only the mouths) of Perry, Mitt Romney, and Glenn Beck. Apparently,
the too-clever-for-their-own-good staffers of the Obama campaign
think that will focus us on the conservatives’ “lies” and
“twist[ing] the facts.” Instead, it’s just uncomfortable and
weird.
If Richard Nixon had kept fetish-like photos of the mouths
of his “enemies,” his web page would have looked like AttackWatch,
though even Nixon probably wouldn’t have used as dark and
intimidating a color scheme as Obama has, and that’s saying
something.
There are plenty of web pages going after Obama’s
propaganda and “thought police,” such as
here and this amusing YouTube faux-advertisement here.
But the real beauty of AttackWatch, which is to say the
seeds of its own destruction, is the campaign’s use of Twitter,
allowing and encouraging thousands, or perhaps millions, of people
to jump into the conversation.
As I follow #attackwatch in my Twitter application on
Thursday morning, I can’t keep up with the updates. A new tweet
hits about every two seconds, almost all of them obviously by
people who are not just opposed to the administration’s
Goebbels-like activities, but who are effectively turning
AttackWatch into the biggest joke in Internet history.
Here are a few of the tweets which have come across the
#attackwatch hashtag just during the writing of this
article:
From DrFreeLance: “I saw a werewolf drinkin a pina colada
at Trader Vic’s, and his hair was perfect.”
From chuckdevore (Republican state legislator in
California): “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean a big
majority of us isn’t out to get you…”
From EddieRobbins: “My neighbor removed his Obama bumper
sticker. I think he’s a racist.”
From DickMeyers: “Bless me #AttackWatch for I have sinned.
I have muttered naughty words about our Dear Leader 9 times &
have doubted his divinity a few times”
From joaniekensil: “Ate refried beans & chips for
breakfast which is sort of racist foodist - Carbon emissions to
follow.”
From PoliticalGravity: “Saw a kid with a lemonade stand
and she didn’t have a permit.”
From thorninaz: “Hey #attackwatch, I saw 6 ATM’s in an
alley, killing a Job. It looked like a hate crime!”
And from the always excellent IowaHawkBlog: “#AttackWatch
have you cried “uncle” yet? Because we can keep this up all f***in’
day.”
Most of these occurred within a 2-minute span. You get the
idea.
The beauty of the Twitter situation is that it is
completely out of the government’s control. They can’t turn off the
hashtag the same way they can turn off an e-mail address or a web
page. At this pace, it’s only a matter of time before even Jon
Stewart and Jay Leno jump on the train to shame and embarrass the
Obama over AttackWatch. It’s too funny to avoid, even for a
liberal, not least because it is so flamboyantly
self-inflicted.
It’s hard to say what’s worse, the Administration’s
blatant attempts at propaganda, its failure to learn from past
mistakes (in this area and many others), or its truly remarkable
incompetence. Don’t forget, in 2008,
voters aged 18-29, likely the biggest group of Twitter users,
cast 66 percent of their ballots for Barack Obama. And at election
time, that age group had a 45 percent Democratic Party affiliation
versus 26 percent for the Republicans (the parties were about even
in this measure just eight years earlier).
Obama needs these naïve and idealistic youngsters (their
votes and their free campaign labor) to have any chance at
re-election (though their horrible post-college employment
prospects are making that extremely difficult). Yet this is exactly
the group now most exposed to this president’s folly. Remember when
John McCain said he didn’t know how to use a computer? The Obama
Administration even ran an ad making fun of
McCain for it, even though the primary reason
for McCain’s lack of computer use is that his
war wounds make typing quite painful.
But now who looks foolish and out of touch on the
Web?
Twitter offered some statistics about itself last week,
including: over 100 million active users around the world,
averaging nearly 1.5 billion (yes, with a “b”) “tweets” per week.
More from the Guardian article linked above: “Twitter’s
website alone records 400 million monthly unique browsers, up 70
percent from the start of 2011, while 55 percent of active users
are on mobile. In contrast with Facebook, growth is increasing this
year compared with last, Twitter claims, with a further 26 million
users likely to join by January. That’s more than 2006-09
combined.”
Is this really the place the Obama administration wanted
to demonstrate how out of touch it is with so many Americans, how
willing it is to be the domineering, mind-controlling,
nagging-parent-like force that young adults regardless of political
persuasion have spent their last decade or two rebelling
against?
By the near-instant overwhelming of the AttackWatch story
by conservatives, and the fact that the overwhelming reaction is
mostly being accomplished with humor, the Obama administration has
done its opponents a tremendous favor. It has allowed
conservatives, for once, to be shown to a huge number of young
people to be funny and light-hearted, while the administration yet
again encourages Americans to use the Internet to report their
friends, neighbors, and colleagues to the government.
Thank goodness Progressives never learn from their
mistakes.
