(This idea started with a discussion among a few of us in magette's Daily Kos diary "Action Plan to Win Pennsylvania" posted on Mar. 5.)
It is no secret that their are a great number of us who would like to see Barack Obama become the next President of the United States. After the March 5 primaries, I, along with apparently a few others, started thinking about what else we could do for the Obama campaign. In particular, we were thinking about campaign obstacles that Sen. Obama has where perhaps we might be able to take some positive action.
I got to thinking about those nasty lying viral emails, of which we'll never know the original source. You know the ones. They question everything from Obama's patriotism, through his religion, etc. They are particularly nasty, and although it's difficult to measure their effect on voting, anecdotal evidence shows that these emails probably provide an undercurrent of misinformation that is costing Sen. Obama votes. By way of my own example, I was standing with an Obama sign outside the polls on election day here in New Hampshire when an older lady came up to me and said, "I was going to vote for Obama, but the whole thing about him refusing to salute the flag really turned me off." I had never seen the viral emails at the time, and her comment totally flummoxed me.
So someone or some group of anti-Obama forces out there is slyly and anonymously using the Internet to spread lies about Obama. "Ha!", I say. They think they know how to leverage the Internet to spread lies? We know the Internet, and we can use it to spread truth! Enter the "Obama Viral Email Project".
The Concept
We, as a community, will compose a counter to the anti-Obama viral emails. It will contain the truth, and when we are done, we will each email it to everyone possible in our address book. We will spread it to other boards, our own personal blogs, social networking sites, and in general make this email ubiquitous throughout the net. It will also contain a plea to the sender to pass on the email, hopefully making this positive Obama virus dwarf the poorly done negative attempts that are out there.
I envision the initial authoring phase of this project to take about a week, with several draft revisions. So on or about next Friday, March 14, I hope we will have an email ready to blast. It will be important to keep the project visible, so please, if you believe the OVEP to be a worthy undertaking, recommend this diary and the others that will follow with each draft, so that we can get as much input as possible.
The Rules
More like suggestions really, and there aren't many.
- I volunteered to use my daily diary allotment for this project and to head it up. I envision that invariably we will have differences of opinion about what should be included in the email, how it should be worded, etc. Thus we need an executive editor for the project, who will make the final decision in cases of disagreement. This morning I held a caucus in my kitchen (because it was cheaper than a primary) and elected myself editor.
- The email needs to be positive and it won't do to draw attention to lies that the reader may never have heard before (thus accomplishing the goals of the anti-Obama email for them). So for example, instead of saying "Barack Obama is NOT a Muslim!", in which case the reader may say "Huh! Was there a question about him being a Muslim?", the better approach is probably, "Barack Obama is a devout Christian, who has been a member of the same Christian church for about 20 years."
- In case it's not obvious, the idea is for the community to contribute ideas for the letter in the form of comments, and then I'll incorporate these into the next draft diary.
- This really is an attempt to do something positive, so if you want to start a candidate war or some such, please go elsewhere.
- Please provide links to backup your points. It is not only important that these be verifiable truths, but that the end reader have a quick way to check them out.
- We may include a few pictures (small, screen resolution), but keep in mind that the end email should not be more than a few pages long and shouldn't tie up limited dialup bandwidth for those users (thus ticking them off). If we find we can't contain the email to a small number of pages, maybe we'll break it up into multiple emails.
- Keep it to an eighth grade level. Remember how wide and diverse the audience is.
That's it! At least for now. Below I've taken a few comments from our discussion the other day and put them into the form of the first diary draft, more by way of example and beginning discussion starter than anything else.
The Current Draft Email
Subject: Barack Obama. Did you Know?
There is a lot of misinformation out there about Barack Obama. A few of us, not connected to the Obama campaign in any way, decided to put together this list of facts you might not know.
- Did you know that Barack Obama is a devout Christian? He has been a member of the same UCC congregation for 20 years, and was married there to his wife Michelle in 19XX. (link? picture?)
- Did you know Barack's grandfather, a Kansas native, served in Patton's army during World War II?
- Did you know that Barack Obama often leads the US Senate in the Pledge of Allegiance?
I'm guilty above of breaking my own rule about links and backup, but I wanted to get something out there this morning that you folks can start working with.
Some other possible ideas that need fleshing out or are areas of fodder:
About his church
bio/background
Patriotism
Veterans Issues
Women's Rights
Substance/Experience?
Friend of Israel
Legislation
In addition, I think we can feel free to steal ideas liberally (like we could do it any other way) from some of the materials the Obama campaign has already published on its web site in defense of some of these smears.
Thanks to magatte, Mother of Zeus, and others for some of these initial suggestions.
Have at it! Remember also to rec this diary so that we can maximize input. Let's put our Net energy into doing something positive for Barack Obama.