Why Would Barack Obama Want to Be Spammer in Chief?

COMMENTARY | In an apparent effort to make the president even more unpopular than he already is, the Obama 2012 website is inviting supporters to submit the email addresses of their Republican friends so that the campaign can build a database.

According to White House Dossier, the purpose could be to send out mass emails to Republicans, presumably from a front group, to urge them to vote for the candidate that Team Obama would like to have their man run against. That would likely be former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a man who likes cutting taxes, reforming entitlements, and colonizing the moon. The effort is similar to "Operation Chaos," a tongue-in-cheek campaign conducted by Rush Limbaugh to motivate people to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election, leading it was hoped to a deadlocked Democratic convention. The effort failed, though it was entertaining while it lasted.

One question arises about this effort. Does the Obama campaign propose to make the president of the United States, in effect, the spammer in chief?

Spammers, who clog email inboxes with everything from offers of access to porn sites to dubious money schemes from fictional Nigerian princes, are somewhere between Occupy Wall Street protestors and child molesters in popular esteem. The manufacturers of spam filters have made almost as much money as the spammers themselves to protect Internet uses from the garbage seeping into their email.

A political campaign -- the identify of which escapes me -- used to do a dirty trick of making robocalls to people in support of that campaign's opponent at 2 a.m. This had the desired effect of turning people against that opponent. A email spam campaign would have a similar effect.

Mind, a strategy to influence the other party to nominate an easily defeated candidate usually does not work. For one thing, how easily defeated a candidate could be is something that is difficult to determine. This is especially true if one has ideological binders on, like the people running the Obama campaign.

One can only look back a little more than 30 years to 1980 and the Carter re-election campaign. The Carter people were happy to run against Ronald Reagan. He was a right-wing nut, a mad bomber who would be easy to demonize. The Carter people were afraid of running against some moderate, such as George H. W. Bush, who would be less scary to the voters.

One wonders whatever happened to that guy Reagan?

Source:Obama Campaign Collecting GOP Emails, White House Dossier, Keith Koffler, Dec 14, 2011