Blog Exposes Creator of Ad Portraying Clinton as Big Brother

[Tigermike 3,054]

Blog Exposes Creator of Ad Portraying Clinton as Big Brother

By PATRICK HEALY

Published: March 22, 2007

A political mystery was solved yesterday with the unmasking of the maker of a much-discussed Internet advertisement that portrayed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as Big Brother. The creator, it turned out, worked for consultants to Senator Barack Obama, a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A spokesman for the Obama campaign said last night that the maker of the advertisement - known as a "mashup" video in Internet parlance - had not worked on the Obama campaign account.

After The Huffington Post blog identified him as Philip de Vellis, Mr. de Vellis wrote in his own item on the same blog that the Obama campaign had not been aware of the advertisement and that he had resigned from the consulting firm, Blue State Digital. The campaign was continuing to use Blue State as an Internet vendor.

The advertisement, which has received more than 1,731,000 views on YouTube during the last two weeks, shows drone8like people marching and sitting at attention as Mrs. Clinton speaks on a giant screen about her wish to have a "conversation" with Americans about the future of the country.

It ends with a female athlete smashing the screen image of Mrs. Clinton with a hammer, followed by two sentences - "On January 14th the Democratic primary will begin. And you'll see why 2008 isn't going to be like '1984'." - and then a tag line, BarackObama.com.

Mr. Obama said on Monday that neither he nor his campaign had anything to do with the advertisement. "I just saw it for the first time, and, you know, one of the things about the Internet is that people generate all kinds of stuff. In some ways, it's - it's the democratization of the campaign process," he said on CNN's "Larry King Live." "Frankly, given what it looks like, we don't have the technical capacity to create something like that. It's pretty extraordinary."

Arianna Huffington, the editor and co-founder of The Huffington Post, wrote in a blog item yesterday that she had asked colleagues to "hit the phones and contact all their sources" to uncover the spot's creator.

The advertisement itself and the unmasking of Mr. de Vellis were further examples of how such Internet-driven efforts have become a factor in the campaign season.

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, said in a statement that the campaign and its employees "had no knowledge and had nothing to do with the creation of the ad."

"We were notified this evening by a vendor of ours, Blue State Digital, that an employee of the company had been involved in the making of this ad," Mr. Burton said. "Blue State Digital has separated ties with this individual, and we have been assured he did no work on our campaign's account."

Efforts to reach Mr. De Vellis were unsuccessful last night. A spokesman for the Clinton campaign declined to comment.

NY TIMES

[Tiger Al 0]

Well thank God we got that one figured out. Good work, Tigermike.

[Tiger in Spain 0]

This guy had best lay low for a while. He's liable to get Vince Fostered. You know the lifelong Yankees fan isn't going to take this one without firing back.