The Republicans and the Barackbook

Today I was reading a New York Times article named “R.N.C. Deletes Comments on Obama Parody Site”. I have to admit the Republican National Committee or otherwise known as the GOP (Grand Old Party) a.k.a the republicans are a creative bunch, but are they effective? Well you be the judge.

Some Background:

The RNC has always had a better fundraising network than the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the executive apparatus of the Democratic Party. The most recent Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports this discrepancy. For instance, in the month of June, The RNC fund raised 26 million compared to the 22.4 million fundraised by the DNC.

Amongst the candidates, there is no comparison. Obama out fundraises his competitor John McCain at a ratio of 2.5:1 in favor of Obama.

Since this election is centered around the theme of Change and Obama has successfully being able to communicate his message of change to voters, especially to young voters. McCain faces an unprecedented challenge to win over young voters. A good illustration of the challenges he faces in attracting this important young demographic that could impact the outcome of this year’s election, one does not need to look further than facebook, the popular social Network. As of Tuesday July 29^th 2008, John McCain had 183,833 compared to Senator Barack Obama’s army of 1,228,319 supporters.

Senator McCain’s response is the Barackbook, a new website and facebook application that parodies Facebook.com, the popular social networking site. The RNC message is simple – obama is inexperienced and lacks good judgement. On the parody site Obama has seven “friends” that includes convicted Chicago businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko and William Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground during the 1970’s.

Interestingly - In addition to a feed page displaying activity between Obama and his “friends,” the RNC site also includes a page featuring YouTube videos about Obama, a page that facilitates donations to the RNC, an RSS feed of information from GOP.com, among other pages.

Is this effective? Well it caught my attention and numerous other progressive and conservative bloggers. We shall find out on November 4^th 2008.

2 Responses to “The Republicans and the Barackbook”

1. Vlad Glebov Says:
   July 30th, 2008 at 7:01 am

   Ridicule is a most potent weapon, used in politics by those who, for a living, are good at getting people’s attention in order to get the opponent off message. However, this excuse for a website is not even close. Its pretty clear they don’t actually know what facebook looks like because this site doesn’t even come close. They couldn’t even get the layout right. I don’t think its creative at all, looks very amateur to me.

   I wonder how many of those 183,833 facebook supporters is just some guy getting sitting in an office, getting paid to create fake facebook accounts to make McCain’s numbers look less embarrassing.

2. Walied Khogali Says:
   July 30th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

   Ridicule is a potent weapon used in politics. If you read the NY times article - the Obama campaign’s response was to highlight the critism and ridicule on the application - Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, put it:“I agree with the first comment thread on their discussion board: ‘The site is lame.’ ”

   PS: The site is a parody to facebook, it was never meant to be an identical mirror of facebook (copyright infringement - check - http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9995188-93.html

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