Did the Obama Campaign Slander a Mega-Volunteer?

[cross-posted to MySpace blog]

It appears that the Obama campaign has chosen to put out misleading and (possibly) slanderous spin about their mishandling of the BarackObama MySpace incident, instead of simply and clearly acknowledging their misdeed.

Whether or not the Obama campaign's spin is intentionally misleading and slanderous is not clear. However, what is clear is that (as of 8:25pm EDT) they have chosen to not issue a correction to a misrepresentation they made in Joe Rospars' blog post, Our MySpace Experiment concerning a potential one-time payment they had suggested to Joe Anthony.

Unfortunately their misrepresentation has started to be repeated on the Internet. Mike (mlmcmull@gmail.com) posted a comment here that is reflective of this:

... it sounds to me like Barack DID do the right thing. Guy volunteers to do a job, works with the official campaign, then suddenly shuts out the official campaign and demands $40k?

Mike has, actually, done an excellent job of summarizing the misrepresentation:

• Guy volunteers to do a job
  
• works with the official campaign
  
• then suddenly shuts out the official campaign
  
• and demands $40k

However, checkout what Micah Sifry, Editor of techPresident, has to say about this:

But what strikes me as odd about it is Rospars' claim that Anthony's "list of itemized financial requests" came unbidden, after the workload on the page exploded and Anthony cut off the campaign's password access to the site. Rospars would have you believe that Anthony was in effect extorting the campaign by witholding access, but my notes of my conversations with Obama staff, which were "on background" make clear that [Joe] Anthony only produced that proposal (the $39,000 plus the $10,000 for possible advertising spending by the campaign on MySpace) at the request of Chris Hughes. [an Obama staffer]

That is worth repeating:

my notes of my conversations with Obama staff ... make clear that [Joe] Anthony only produced that [financial] proposal ... at the request of Chris Hughes [an Obama staffer]

So, here is the editor of an independent news source saying that the Obama campaign confirmed the one-time payment was THEIR IDEA.

Joe Anthony said this exact same thing in his blog post:

In a conversation with Chris from the campaign last week or the week before, Chris suggested a one-time fee to transfer over the [MySpace] profile to [the Obama campaign] and that they discussed this with Myspace and [MySpace was] agreeable with any arrangement we could work out. He did not suggest how much, or what sort of a fee. He did say that he needed it by the next morning so we scheduled another meeting and I stayed up all night working on a proposal that I thought would be fair to everyone. This was a positive conversation and he seemed sincere enough.

Notice that not only did the idea for the one-time fee come from the Obama campaign, but the Obama campaign had, also, already discussed the one-time payment idea with MySpace BEFORE they presented it to Joe Anthony.

So, the summary for the REAL story of this one-time payment is:

• Guy gets inspired and sets up MySpace website
  
• Guy works ON HIS OWN for TWO YEARS
  
• Official Campaign starts to get involved AFTER TWO YEARS of work
  
• Official Campaign ORIGINATES one-time payment idea
  
• Official Campaign TALKS WITH MYSPACE about a one-time payment
  
• MySpace APPROVES one-time payment deal idea
  
• Official Campaign SUGGESTS one-time payment idea to Guy
  
• Guy figures out a number he feels is fair
  
• Guy RESPONDS to Official Campaign's Suggestion of a one-time payment
• Official Campaign balks at the number Guy comes up with
  
• Official Campaign shuts-down talks and does NOT counter-offer or negotiate
• Official Campaign talks MySpace into forcibly transferring Guy's MySpace website
• Official Campaign spreads misleading and slanderous spin about Guy
  
• Internet picks-up and spreads the misleading and slanderous spin about Guy
  

At least, this is how things appear to have played-out, based on publicly available data.

I look forward to seeing any clarifications that are issued on this.

Just to be clear, I am not anti-Obama. Actually, up until yesterday, he was my favorite candidate in the race. Now, I'm not so sure. It all depends on how he handles this situation.