Obama's MySpace Flap

Looks like the Obama campaign hit an Oh-shit! moment yesterday.

One Joe Anthony last year registered a MySpace url and became a true believer in the Obama for President campaign. He built a huge following and was one of the campaign's most dedicated promoters, but campaign operatives took steps to take over the space with little more than a Thanks-a-lot (read $$$$ here) and the rest is a tawdry tale of how money trumps principles (or doesn't). John Robb's blog furnished the dirt link. Kos already has over a thousand comments.

Whatever the case, at this point it appears the Obama people simply decided that they would get control of the myspace.com/barackobama url by going around Anthony and getting MySpace to lock down his access to it. In their view, Anthony was violating MySpace's terms of service by falsely representing himself as Obama, and thus they didn't have to pay him anything. The worst that would happen, they reasoned, is that they would have to rebuild the candidate's network of friends.

I'm not all that interested in the details. Barack Obama himself made a personal call to Anthony, the details of which were not recorded. But that's not important at this point. What is important is that the poop is in the street and there is no way it can be stuffed back into the elephant.

It will be interesting to see how this is handled.

This is why I don't spend time with the top-tier people. They waste so much time and energy on stuff like this that there is little left for issues that are really important. Call me when it's over.