Axelrove’s Astroturf Army And The Trippi Influence

As the PUMAsphere rightly, and righteously, continues to rail against those responsible for inflicting the festering wound of Obamanism upon the Democratic party, it might be useful to take a moment to examine exactly where the blame belongs.  While there is no doubt that Joe Cannon at Cannonfire and John-South of Melrose at Liberal Rapture are absolutely correct that the Hopium-hooked of Huffcheetoville have caused irreparable harm to the party with their over-the-top, irrational, indefensible, threats, taunts, and vitriolic rants against anyone and anything daring to express anything approaching the appearance of the possibility of potential criticism of the Unworthy One, one must ask oneself, “who are these idiots, and who let them out?”  The answer to that question is at once, obvious and, a little convoluted.

We all tend to point fingers at the people who gave these rabid mobs a platform from which to rant, but, that might not be quite fair.  While the Arianna-heads and Kossacks of the blogosphere certainly must own up to their fair share of responsibility, the bulk of the blame lies in the laps of David Axelrove’s Astroturfing Army, who, in many instances, hijacked website comment sections freeper-like, with military-style precision, often in response to articles posted on even those sites that don’t fit the Obots’ email ordered acceptability standards.  It’s not hard to imagine that this online campaign began with the employment of a relatively small number of paid Obots and their sock puppets, and morphed into the larger online force via the drafting and careful cultivation of inferiority complex-plagued basement dwellers into Axelrove’s email army via their vaunted big donor-hiding, “small donor” list.

Joe Trippi, the architect of the “bottom up” approach to politics, is often blamed for causing this “revolution,” but I’m not sure that this actually holds up.  More likely the damage has been caused by the deliberate misappropriation of Trippi’s overly idealistic tactics by the far more Machiavellian Axelrove.   While Trippi certainly has done his fair share to advance the cause of Obamanism, that’s probably most due to the fact that Obama is the guy whose campaign most wholeheartedly embraced his concepts.  However, when it came right down to it, the Obama campaign rejected Trippi the man, outright.

Early on, Trippi shopped his services around to both the Obama and Clinton campaigns and was turned down flat.  Even then, though, it seems his heart was with Obama, leading to speculation that his eventual employment with John Edwards was as an Axelrove-approved plant.   In early November of 2007, The Garance posted the info that, though employed by Edwards,  Trippi was a member of Obama’s Facebook group, and featured a screenshot supporting their claim.  They also quoted Noam Scheiber’s 6-page Trippi profile in The New Republic:

Trippi guest-lectured at Northwestern for a class taught by Obama strategist David Axelrod, and the two men briefly discussed how he might join the campaign. Several weeks later, Trippi met with Clinton strategist Howard Wolfson to discuss a possible role in Hillaryland. When neither option panned out, an acquaintance put Trippi in touch with John and Elizabeth Edwards. He flew down to North Carolina for a three-hour conversation and accepted a job with Edwards a few weeks later.

Around the same time, Allegre on Daily Kos, was asking outright if Trippi was an Obama plant in Edwards camp.   Coupla days later, Politico’s Ben Smith revealed Trippi’s Iowa cheerleading for Obama in front of a Des Moines hotel bar crowd including of a group of 20-something organizers clad in Obama-red “Fired Up! tee-shirts, and Terry McAuliffe:

When a man on the edge of the group yelled the slogan, they answered with the response they’d been chanting all night: “Ready to go.”

“Fired up!” the rumpled, older man yelled again.

“Ready to go!” the crowd shouted back again. “Fired up!” he called. “Ready to go!”

“Let’s kick her ass,” the cheerleader finally called out, and the crowd roared.

The cheerleader — Joe Trippi, chief adviser to Sen. John Edwards, new-politics guru, and all-around mischief maker — glanced gleefully over at McAuliffe.

Smith claims Trippi was just “having on” with McAuliffe, but, only backs that up with the fact that there’s no evidence to the contrary.  However, in June of that year, when Joe was warning the British about the old ways of “top down” politicking via  The Guardian, and scolding TechRepublican’s David All for threatening to “flood the zone” by screwing with search engine keywords to divert attention from potentially embarrassing You Tube “macaca” videos, Trippi’s alumni was already on the Obama/Axelrove payroll, wreaking havoc on the internet.

In February of this year, I did a post tracing the genesis of obscene ObamaLove back to the insidious, insipid, ubiquitous You Tube video,  “I Got A Crush On Obama,” which lead me back to the earlier “1984” anti-Hillary video, traced directly back to the Obama campaign via a company called Blue State Digital.   BSD, credited with creating and maintaining Mybarackobama.com through its various incarnations to its present-day Organizing for America persona, signed onto the O-Train possibly as early as 2006, (a fact once touted on their website) but definitely by February, 2007, a week after he announced his candidacy for president.  BSD has also worked for George Soros, Ted Kennedy, and AT&T (co-incidently, a company that has employed the services of Axelrod’s recently former Astroturfing company, ASK).  By May, WaPo was reporting on Obama’s baby web-guru phenom, Joe Rospars, of Blue State Digital fame, who was also a Trippi trained Deaniac.  Rospars is a big proponent of innovative, viral You Tube video tactics, as well as co-opting other people’s websites.

The point of all this is that even though Trippi is intricately involved in all things Obama, I’m not sure he has the huevos to play as dirty as the Axelrovians.  He seems more like a professorial sheepdog, brilliant at what he does, intentionally, if not lovably, clueless about the darkside of his own innovations. In fact, sometimes Joe seems downright, well…trippy. Axelrove, demonstrably, is not.

In January of 2007, the New York Observer traced a website named Obama4America back to a Trippi-founded company, which disavowed any then-current association with Joe Trippi.  However, the Observer didn’t explore whether Joe Rospars or any othe Blue State Digital employees were involved, which seems more likely.  At any rate, by November, Time Magazine was asking whether Obama could “rock the nomination,” quoting both Axelrod and Trippi, and by December, Trippi was accusing Camp O of using cheap tricks as a result of being in “deep shit.”  By November, ‘08, Trippi was panelizing with Arianna Huffington, patting themselves on the back for being partially responsible for the internet-based foisting of Obama on America:

“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president,” Huffington said. “Were it not for the Internet, he would not have been the Democratic nominee.”

This is definitely true, but the “small donors ” and “bottom up” happy crappy they’re pushing is not nearly as important, in my opinion, as the Obotomizing of the comment sections of “progressive” bloggerizers.  Those bullies hellbent on crushing the opposition on blog sites large and small, across the blogosphere, are the reason the narrative of Obama “inevitability” was allowed to take root and grow into the illusion of overwhelming support.  From MSNBC to sister site The Root, from HuffPo to WaPo and all sites in between, a handful of paid hopium-heads wielded undue influence on the process.  It only takes a few useful idiots on a website, or radio station, or even better, radio station website, to make themselves seem like a groundswell of outrage representative of all of black America’s wrath over “unfair” criticism of the stereotyping Undercover Brother Pretendident.  The same is true for all other incidences of feigned righteous indignance throughout the media, mainstream and otherwise, in support of Obama.  Such outpourings of offense soon became postulates, self-fulfilling prophesies based upon nothing but the illusions generated in David Axelrod’s war room.  One need only to revisit posts throughout the “progressive” blogosphere, critical of, or waffling about, Barack Obama’s viability to see the Obots’ handiwork.  In fact, re-reading Joe Cannon’s rant, one cannot escape the fact that it’s the commenters spewing the venom at everybody, PUMAs in particular.  In my opinion, the smartest thing PUMA bloggers have ever done, besides come to exist, is to diligently block the KoolAid Brigade from our sites.

Of course, Trippi, and others, like, oh, say, Donna Brazile, have made it their business to take turns driving the O-Train down our throats, but, ultimately, they merely disseminated the Camp O-provided ammunition for Axie’s Army to spray aound the blogosphere.  And, though the mindfucking and manipulation was oppressive and, to my mind, unethical, it was probably no moreso than Madison Avenue’s relentless selling of junk food to kids; reprehensible, but, not illegal, and, with proper parenting, only marginally effective.  Without the relentless jackbooted force-feeding of Obacrap from the Obacolytes, cluelessly devoted to the Obamessiah either out of the misguided love of the preternaturally loney, or by the inflated-ego exploitation of the  intellectually self-impressed, or simply motivated by the love of money, Barack Obama would not be president today.  That’s the dirty underwear little secret, Arianna and Joe.  It ain’t what you said and did, it’s what you let them say and do in your name.

So, for those concerned that Joe Trippi’s involvement in the New Way Forward protest agenda taints the process, I would say, probably not.  Even the presense of a lot of the seemingly rabid, “progressive” bloggers is probably not a big deal, since they all got played, too, and some of them are slowly awakening to that fact.  But, it’s hard to admit you got seduced, used,  and discarded like an old condom by a geek.  I don’t feel sorry for them, they should all know a geek when they see one.  But, like the bleeding heart, tree-hugging, ultra liberals who sleep with the thieving gardener because he’s a fatherless minority whose pain they feel so acutely that only giving him a blowjob on Mommy and Daddy’s sheets will assuage their conscience and satisfy their rebellious spirit, while validating their well-intentioned, good-person-ness, they got fucked.

So, did we all; but I’ll save my real anger for the scheming butt wipes who got them together so they could clean out the safe while they thought nobody was looking.

And, if Joe Trippi turns out to be one of the latter, then fuck him, too.