Agreed all around - MySpace gave Obama the credibility of being a "candidate of the people."  This guy organized that site and ran it for 2.5 years.  To say that he did no work and it wasn't worth compensating by the campaign is disgusting.

If MySpace didn't happen for Obama, could he really have sold his donor numbers during the 1Q reporting?  I doubt it.  More people are driven to MySpace than Barack's own site, and I'd trust the numbers on the semi-independent MySpace more than I'd trust any of the posts on Barack's blogs, which the campaign ultimately controls.

anyone's support of Obama but two things are clear.

1.. Obama's campaign asked Joe to come up with a number in bad faith.. they had not intention of paying him anything.  Even on dKos Joe Respars did not answer repeated questioning of why they asked him to come up with a number.

2.  regardless of the value of the bad press - it's still worth 39K to a campaign with 25 million in the bank to have 160,000 email adresses of likely supporters..

Nothing bothered me more in the discussion yesterday than the argument that Anthony's work wasn't valuable. That line of argumentation had strong overtones of implying that all internet and netroots work conducted on behalf of a campaign was not valuable.

Indeed. There was even a diary to this effect yesterday. What bothers me is that they implied that they would pay him something, and then locked him out. If someone's a volunteer, make that clear - don't ask them to name a price.

post.

I think the issues you discuss -- the role of ordinary people in the netroots, i.e., democracy -- are more important than defending or attacking Obama, depending on one's candidate of choice.

The progressive movement is more important than any one candidate.  

The real issue here is how should campaigns interact with netroots supporters and volunteers.  Do they work with or do they exploit?  There are two basic models, one egalitarian, the other hierarchical.  Of course, there is a range between extreme versions of either model.  

In this particular situation, and it might have been any candidate's campaign staff, it looks like they chose exploit and hierarchy. I believe that a top/down model does not fit the possibilities created by the internet and "direct democracy."  Thus, the methods they choose are self-defeating.

Time will tell.  

I guess it is precisely because Obama is so popular that these issues are even issues.  And I guess that Obama has to be tested on every front in order to make to the finals. My only hope is that we don't beat up on him so much that we get Clinton by default.  That would be a shame.

I'm concerned about the lack of ethics shown by the Obama campaign here.  It's not ok to step on a little guy, and to smear his reputation out of an institutional defensiveness.  And the reason is quite practical - if this isn't stopped, it's going to happen again at a less opportune moment and severely damage Obama's campaign.  Imagine this happening during the DNC Convention in 2008.  What a nightmare.

If Obama's people were smart, they would take this seriously and fix the campaign.  Obama supporters should push for this to be fixed.

Where in FEC law, is any campaign allowed to receive a list of 160K potential or actual supporters for free?  For anything other than "fair market value"?

Even if they hired Anthony they would have had to have compensated him for the list.  

Is 0.25 a name, fair market value?  I don't know.  My guess is, its a lot more than that.

what you are saying about value of work and the gray area nature of Anthony's work/volunteering for the campaign.

ie. Your argument is that Anthony had moved beyond being a volunteer, both campaign and Anthony knew it, and whatever the "he said/she said" of the negotiations, the Obama campaign should send a message that the kind of "work/vountering" Anthony was doing should be properly valued.

I hear that point of view, even if I have real, pragmatic reservations about retroactive pay for volunteering by campaigns.

That being said, I've volunteered, over the years, enormous amounts of skilled, semi-skilled and "not-so-skilled-at-all" time to campaigns and non-profits.

What I recognized in that story, and I think MyDD, Dkos and Atrios should have recognized, was a VERY common scenario.  What happens when unpaid work for a campaign or a cause goes beyond volunteering? What happens when a campaign and a beloved vounteer have a disagreement?

There are almost always bad feelings and misunderstandings like this in every campaign and organization. Hell, even among folks who are highly paid from the get go there can be bad feelings.

This was NOT the clear cut case that MyDD, dailykos and Atrios made it out to be.

This story was fundamentally misreported and it was, essentially, overhyped.

I hear your point about the nature of the work Joe Anthony was doing.

I also think that the coverage of this story and the invective against the Obama campaign hurled around the blogs showed a real weakness of our medium and some very real failure to achieve even a semblance of balance on a topic that, aside from  the novelty of the MySpace factor, represents a very common situation.

1. Locked out Obama's campaign.
2. Tries to alienate the 160,000 people on myspace.  

Whether he did or didn't deserve money, he surely doesn't now IMO.  

(Personally, if Joe A. wanted a financial deal he should have set one up from the start.  You don't hold the door open, play guitar, etc. and then ask for money after the fact.)

... yet, after coming back from canvassing, I don't demand money from the campaign. I'm sorry, but I can't feel bad for a volunteer who suddenly feels he is worth more money than many congressional race campaign managers get paid.

Secondly, read PsiFighter's diary on MySpace/Facebook... I think you guys are terribly mistaken about just what these sites are. They are very different that MyDD/DKos/etc.

Thirdly, please remember that 30,000 or even 160,000 is actually NOT very many MySpace friends.

If I were a donor, I would be terribly upset if the Obama campaign was spending that much money on this.

Lastly, Chris, you lose credibility by targeting your outrage at this.

Chris wrote "Obama supporters in the netroots who echoing that view simply in order to defend their candidate..." Obama supporters will say ANYTHING at this point. They will argue that he is the greatest friend of the grassroots in one sentence and in the next explain away his campaign's latest screwing of the grassroots as "necessary for him to get elected."

Seriously, could you imagine the 2003/2004 Dean campaign ending up at loggerheads with an ardent netroots supporter like this? Me neither. If this were the Dean campaign, Joe would have moved to Burlington by now.

I'm still waiting for an Obama supporter to explain the hiring of Robert Gibbs as campaign spokesman (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2 /22/134458/142) as anything other than a big F.U. to Dean supporters and wink, wink signal to big $ donors who are frightened by Dean's empowerment of the grassroots that Obama sides with them (the big donors). (I wonder how long it takes Gibbs and other Obama campaign officials and consultants to earn $39,000 from the campaign.)

I write all this, btw, as someone who may well end up voting for Obama in the primary (if it looks like he's the only one who can stop Hillary). I'm just not under any illusions about the true insider nature of his campaign. (I admit to being under some illusions about him when I donated to and did other work for his 2004 primary campaign for Senate. I learned....)

somewhat tangential, but I noted this from the reposting of Sifry:

"but my notes of my conversations with Obama staff, which were 'on background'"

What's wrong with this picture? When you speak "on background," that generally means not only not for specific attribution (ie, Joe Jones said this), but not for identification either (ie, Obama staffers). Remember Deep Throat was so named because he was speaking on "deep background"--meaning, don't even THINK of referring to me in any way!

My guess is that the things Obama's staff told Sifry on background, were things that Obama's staff did not want published as coming from Obama's staff, even unnamed as individuals. I'm still learning and make my own mistakes, but if you're going to play journalist as a blogger, you've got to play by the rules.

It seems to me that we're wasting a lot of ink debating the ethics of Obama's campaign staff, as opposed to Obama himself.  No one has alleged that Obama got personally involved in negotiating terms with the MySpace guy.

We're not even talking about someone like Obama's chief foreign policy advisor, or some other person who might be presumed to have influence over the candidate's views.  You can wax philosophic about how it shows Obama doesn't run a tight ship or whatever, but at the end of the day, we're debating the actions of people who have absolutely nothing to do with how Obama would run the country.  So we could probably stand to dial it down just a notch.

What I don't understand is this. If a DC insider consulting firm had 160,000 names a campaign would have no hesitation and no problem at all paying a tremendous amount of money for it. Obama has been using Daschle's donor base which I think is around 80,000 people. I would guess there is some type of arrangement financially and politically for Obama to tap into Daschle's network.

The amount of money this guy wanted for 2 1/2 years of work is barely even minimum wage for the massive amount of work he did. DC insiders get paid much more than that for just a few days of work which does not produce as much in the way of results.

I certainly don't agree with how this was handled by the campaign and I think the way this guy valued his efforts was more than fair (i've worked in internet marketing consulting for the last 6 years and I can tell you i don't work for $50 an hour and I work directly with client with no overhead.   Agencies charge a whole lot more on an hourly rate).  I think the campaign royally screwed up.   But what shocks me most is that the campaign admits they are flying by the seat of their pants while doing this.   Personally i find that unacceptable.   They aren't inventing anything new here.  There are people who know how to do this without flying by the seat of their pants.  Reminds me of this quote from the Rollingstone article on how all the dem campaigns are hiring the same old strategists who do things the same old way.

"People are not getting their information the same way they were five years ago, yet the consultants have been very slow to react," he says. "Why aren't campaigns doing what Google and Yahoo do: using algorithms to analyze e-mail lists and figure out what moves people on a daily basis? If you had this conversation with a consultant in Washington, they'd say, 'What do you mean, algorithm?' "

This was a rookie move.  Personally I would've bought the myspace page as soon as I found out it existed.  Probably could've got it for the equivalent of the catering costs on on TV commerical shoot.

And i'd be interested in Adam B's ( i think he is the law guy) input on www.mikehuckabee.com   From what i've been reading you seem to think that he has no legal right to that domain.   If I were him i'd be fighting like hell to make Huckabee pay me a big chunk of money.  

I'm pleased to see references to internet industry fee structures in Anthony's support. I don't know what paralegals earn in LA, but . . . .

This is really pathetic:

"Nothing bothered me more in the discussion yesterday than the argument that Anthony's work wasn't valuable."

Joe Anthony did some incredibly valuable VOLUNTEER work. Volunteer = free. If he wanted money for what he was doing, he should have asked for it up front.

To which the Obama campaign would have replied: "Thanks, but no thanks... we'll have one of the interns do it for free."

Joe Anthony, despite the kind words of Joe Rospar yesterday, was participating in extortion. Luckily, the Myspace terms of service protects the names of high profile celebrities and polticians from being hi-jacked.

Joe Anthony's work WAS worth offering him a position in the campaign, which they did, but it wasn't worth any money. When he asked for money, they said no and let him keep his work. All they took was the url, which was rightfully theres and which took no work for Anthony to obtain in the first place.

Myspace and facebook are not the netroots. Stop whining.

Obama needs to put an end to this.  Pay the guy.  He deserves it and the campaign can afford it.

It's cheaper than a TV spot and much more useful.

People who support a candidate that uses unethical means to gain financially taking the side of a man who tried to extort money from a Presidential Campaign.

Big Shock there.

NOT!

A point no one seems to be bringing up:  can someone sell an email list from Myspace (or elsewhere) to the highest bidder, without the consent of the people on the list?  Did they have any expectation of privacy when they signed up?  Is there a standard disclaimer saying "your email address may be sold to people who will solicit money from you"?

Honestly I'm not too upset about the payment issue. At some point they should have paid him but how long was he doing that under expectation of compensation? On some level he was a volunteer for some amount of time.

As I said though, I think his work has value that should be monetarily compensated but the process of locking out the site is what bothers me the most.

The campaign was WRONG, and they need to stop trying to slander this young man. It makes them look worse.