It is almost funny when someone "thinks" they have the power to do X and it turns out that Y really controls the issue. In a fight over 50k ish, the Barack Obama campaign didn’t recognize that a guy with 160,000 politically interested friends on myspace qualifies as "major media."
The short version of the Barack Obama Bullying story is
- volunteer Joe Anthony creates and grows a myspace fan page for Barack Obama.
- when he announces for president they play along nicely.
- the campaign then wants control so they ask him to turn it over
- the volunteer says "I have been working on this for 3 years. it is worth about 50k"
- the campaign says "screw you" and has myspace yank the domain away from him.
- the campaign loses the 160k friends as part of the deal
Here is the wild card. The volunteer still "owns" his 160k friends. He can create a new domain called myspace.com/how-barackobama-hosed-me/ and restore them all there. Or a John Edwards fan page. My point is, pick your fights.
Politically this was a major misstep on the part of the Barack Obama campaign.
And it is a worrisome error, as our country is known for arrogant decisions like this. We must breed it into our politicians. At least this was a domestic political PR error and not a geopolitical act of bullying.