“Fight the Smears”
Senator Obama’s campaign launched an interesting website today, “Fight the Smears“. Its basically a fact-checking site dedicated to combating the rumors and lies getting sent around online about the Senator. Time’s Karen Tumulty has the inside story:
That don’t-go-there approach was Barack Obama’s plan for months until, on the candidate’s first full day of campaigning as his party’s presumed presidential nominee, a reporter from McClatchy Newspapers who was traveling aboard his plane asked him about a particularly toxic bit of hearsay that was zooming around the Internet about his wife Michelle. Obama lost his cool. “We have seen this before. There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it,” Obama said, bristling. “That gives legs to the story. If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody has said something inappropriate, let them do it.”
That night, in a conference call, Obama told his top aides it was time for a more aggressive solution to the rumors that have been popping up on the Internet about him and his family for months. And so the Obama campaign has built what might best be described as a Web-based rumor clearinghouse, located at fightthesmears.com, in which it hopes all the shady stories about Obama’s faith, his family and his rumored connections with controversial figures can go to die.
Obama is enlisting his millions of supporters to help him hunt down and quash these stories, just as those supporters helped him turn his insurgent campaign into a history-making juggernaut. Says Obama adviser Anita Dunn: “We will not allow Michelle — or, for that matter, Barack—to be defined by rumors.”
I’m curious to see how exactly this is going to work. I imagine there are going to be a lot of smears going around to debunk and its going to take more then a couple hard-working interns to do so. Further, its a little odd for a campaign to be collecting lies told about them, though I don’t see away around that.
There’s also the classic political problem at play here, do you address the rumors and thereby validate them or do you just ignore them? Obama has decided, I think rightly, that he has to make some effort to address them, perhaps out of a justifiable fear that the pathetic media will “report” on them. Still, he gives some validation to the lies/rumors by choosing them to debunk.
Either way, this website isn’t really designed for the die-hard right-wing crazies who won’t stop believing just because an Obama website pointed them to the truth. Its for the media, and for those with more rational, open-minds. I guess we’ll see if it works.
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