Read Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation Online

Authors: Jason Mattera

Tags: #Current Events, #Literature: Classics, #Performing Arts, #Literary Collections, #Democracy, #Political Process, #Political Ideologies - Democracy, #Elections, #Communication in politics, #United States, #Political Ideologies, #Conservatism, #Political Science, #Youth, #Politics, #Essays, #General, #Political Process - Elections, #Political activity, #Fiction

Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation (8 page)

BOOK: Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation
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The campaign continued to collect a gold mine of cell numbers, and especially when they announced that if you texted your number to the campaign, Barack himself would notify you of his vice presidential pick first--via text messaging! The cell numbers poured in.

Once the campaign had your cell number, they were going to use it: asking for financial support, encouraging you to vote, encouraging your friends to vote. It was a personal appeal directly to you. "To me, texting is the most personal form of communi- cation," said Scott Goodstein, the Obama official who hatched the scheme. "Your phone is with you almost all the time. You're tex
ting with your girlfriend. You're texting with your friends. Now you're texting with Barack."
42

The real text-messaging coup occurred at the Democratic National Convention. While the seventy-five thousand supporters were shuffling into Invesco Field in Denver, the Obama team turned them into campaign volunteers. Obama's Colorado director, Ray Rivera, asked the crowd to pull out their cell phones and send a text message to a designated number. "We're going to do some work," he said.
Of this strategy, the Associated Press noted that "the speech itself may or may not become a seminal moment in the campaign" but instead "a shrewd and groundbreaking calculation to expand Obama's vote base."
43

If you're thinking it, you're correct: that was seventy-five thousand new numbers--direct contacts--added in one night. Do you even need to ask if McCain's people added text-messaging features to their outreach? Please, don't.

In addition to the text messages, Obama's campaign arranged 130 telephone stations throughout Invesco and asked attendees to take turns making "scripted" calls to unregistered eligible voters. Young people were the specific target. Through microtargeting techniques, B.H.O.'s legions identified 170,000 people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four in Missouri who were eligible, but unregistered to vote.
44
Guess who got a call from Invesco Field?

Text messaging zipped at lightning speed also helped manufacture crowds. Before Obama hit up a rally in Colorado, his online crew sent a text to his supporters in the area saying "Rally with Barack in Denver this Sunday!" along with an address and a reminder that it was "Free & open to public." More than one hundred thousand people descended from all over Colorado to attend this gathering in a key battleground state that His Holiness eventually won.
45
Voila: how
to create an Obama Zombie, text-messaging-style. All in all, Team Obama collected a million cell numbers through their text-messaging outreach.

And what would be a discussion about new media without mentioning the O-phone? Yes, Obama even had his own
ringtone
! Before the election, Rospars and company unveiled an application for the iPhone that, like any good Zombie material, was advertised as a "comprehensive connection to the heart of Barack Obama."
46
The application even featured portions of Obama's speeches "mashed up" into ringtones. Sadly, campaign officials declined to include sermons from the radical reverend Jeremiah Wright and book readings from the terrorist Bill Ayers mixing to the beats of the Black Eyed Peas.

In addition to fluffy Obama speeches, the application served as a mini MyBO, enabling volunteers to organize their phone directory so that those individuals located in contested states appeared first.
47
The
New York Times
observed that "Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly."
48

SO WHAT DOES
the McCain camp do to hop into the Internet game? Pork Invaders, people. A doofy little video game called "Pork Invaders." The goal of the game was to shoot down pigs while dodging their flying projectiles. Once victory was claimed over the vermin, numbers appeared before the viewer detailing Obama's massive requests for "earmarks," a congressional provision that wastes funds on specific projects in the home state of senators and congressmen, usually to curry favor with donors and lobbying organizations.

That was the McCain campaign's Internet outreach. Freaking
"Pork Invaders." Don't count on me to defend it; it didn't look like Halo, that's for sure. More like Pacman, circa 1980s.

Obama hires Facebook dude and Emmy winners, unveils an iPhone application, compiles 13 million email addresses that sent more than 7,000 messages,
49
and organizes the largest phone bank in the history of mankind. And we conservatives get Pork Invaders. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that it's hardly a surprise that nearly 25 percent of all young people had personal contact with someone from the Obama campaign, and why 28 percent of young voters in battleground states--far greater than in any other age bracket--said they had attended an Obama campaign event.
50

THE IRONY IS
that the conservative message is in direct alignment with young people's craving for individual choice and services, all of which new media fuel and foster. That's something big government can never provide. The Web empowers individuals in ways unimagined a generation ago. Online participation is the ultimate endorsement of limited government. We choose; we decide; we are not regulated, coerced, engineered, or taxed. The world is a mouse click away.

The very existence of things like Facebook and YouTube is a testament to the power of what a free people can do, and also gives conservatives relatable talking points when confronting the Zombie. Government bureaucrats never told Chris Hughes, or his roommate at Harvard, to create Facebook. The same goes for the innumerable number of social networking sites today, including the amazing cell phone technology we have--a multiple array of BlackBerrys to pick from and an iPhone with more than twenty-five thousand applications. These are the fruits of ingenuity, innovation, and the profit mo
tive. Ever wonder why the aforementioned industries thrive while highly regulated programs such as health care, Social Security, and housing are all jacked up? Ever notice that when a free market isn't suffocated, prices plunge and choices spike? Free markets have made available to everyone--rich and poor alike--gadgets that we could never dream of living without: air conditioners, microwaves, stoves, refrigerators, washing machines, clothes dryers, and computers of all shapes and sizes. We couldn't fathom a society without such luxuries. Thank you, capitalism.

But Obama's Congress continues its descent into bigger government and less freedom, offering legislative bills topping a thousand pages, all with new schemes for regulation and redistribution of wealth to the cronies of their choice. In fact, Obama is on track to have more "czars" than Ben & Jerry's has flavors!

My generation is easily deceived into believing the left's grandiose promises. Our idealism and relative comfort clouds our judgment. We tend to be healthy, without mortgages, not yet parents, carefree relative to past generations of Americans. So when some politician, especially a cultic one like Obama, promises universal health care, an end to poverty, or to heal our nation and fix the economy, we place undue trust in the power of government, because we've never experienced its inefficiencies and pathologies. It's time to wake up! It's time to spend more time thinking, and less time following!

3
The Dave Matthews Electoral Magnet-- And Other Ways to Manufacture a Crowd

Why Whacked-Out Celebrities Matter Far More Than You Think, and How They Create Electoral "Laboratories" for Obama Zombies

What would make you be a good mother or father, sister or brother, or even a caring neighbor? Human decency? Your values? Or the election of a president?

For the Tinsel Town know-nothings who inhabit Hollywood, electing B.H.O. was nothing short of a rediscovery of the basic adult responsibility.

Following the election, Demi Moore and her
Punked
husband, Ashton Kutcher, produced a video pledging their support to Dear Leader. With them were an all-star cast of Hollywood heavyweights, including Cameron Diaz, Dakota Fanning, Jaime Pressly, Ashlee
Simpson, Nicole Richie, Tobey Maguire, Diddy, Alyssa Milano, Marisa Tomei, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette. The hyperbolic lovefest reached operatic heights.

I pledge to end hunger in America,
went one line. In the history of the planet, hunger has never been eliminated. But somehow, when cometh Barack, the seas will part, the mountains will crumble, the skies will open, and poverty will henceforth be abolished.

Sweet, bro!

And that's just one line. Kutcher--whom I will grant some slack because he is, after all, married to Demi Moore--defended his video as a clarion call to Hollywood to stand up and help B.H.O. solve the world's ills.

"There's an assumption that this one man is going to take on his new job full-time and somehow wave a magic wand of change, and I don't believe that to be true," Ashton told Reuters. "I think that we have to be the leaders, and that's not celebrities--I think that we as citizens have to be leaders of the movement that we want to create."
1

I pledge to smile more, to laugh more, to love more . . .
I pledge to be a great mother; to be a great father . . .
To be the voice for those who have no voice . . .
I pledge to consider myself an American, not an African- American . . .

This last line is delivered by then-New York Giants linebacker Michael Strahan. Here's a dude who raked in millions on the gridiron who will, now and
only
now, pledge to refer to himself as an American--because Obama got elected?! Earth to brother Strahan: You freaking won a Super Bowl under the tenure of President Bush. Were you not an American then?

The pledging to the most mind-numbing of basic duties of citizenship rolled on:

To always represent my country with pride, dignity, and honesty . . .
I pledge allegiance to the funk, to the united funk of funkadelica . . .

This last enlightening insight comes from Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not gonna lie to you--I have no clue what this means. Then again, it's doubtful he did, either. So take heed, kiddies: drugs will make you pledge allegiance to funk.

I pledge to never give anyone the finger when I'm driving again . . .
I pledge to bring awareness to mental disease, to advance stem-cell research . . .
I pledge to show more love to strangers . . . [especially strangers who hate America and loathe her existence]
I pledge to be a better mentor to my younger sisters . . .
For the environment, I pledge to flush only after a deuce, never a single . . . [Liberals have a strange fascination with doo-doo.]
I pledge . . .
To work to make good the two-hundred-year-old promise to end slavery . . .
To free one million people from slavery in the next five years . . .
I pledge . . .
I pledge to never stop learning and growing each and every day . . .

And the finale, people:

What's your pledge?
I pledge to be a servant to our president and all mankind.

There you have it, folks. Prior to January 21, 2009, if you happened to have been a delinquent parent, experienced road rage, were ashamed of America, flushed the toilet for "number ones," were a hyphenated American, a pouter, and a supporter of the slave trade, well, no longer! Hollywood and Obama pledged to implant a moral compass in you.

You might be wondering, okay, who gives a donkey's rear about what some pampered actor has to say? And normally, you would be right. Demi Moore may strip with Oscar-winning elegance on camera, but she's in no position to be giving out life advice. But when it comes to my generation, Hollywood matters. Team Obama knew this. And thus they unleashed Tinsel Town like never before, deploying celebrity SWAT teams to battleground states, hosting swank mega-fund-raisers, organizing free concerts (perfect lure bait for aspiring Obama Zombies), cold-calling voters, emailing, and machine-gunning text messages with dizzying regularity and lightning speed.

Celebs were gaga over B.H.O.! And it wasn't surprising they'd help elect the most superficial and egomaniacal candidate we've ever seen. As Tina Daunt of the
Los Angeles Times
put it, "If Obama loses, there won't be a shrink in Beverly Hills with an hour to spare."
2

Kelly Hu of
X-Men
and
Terminator: Salvation
declared that B.H.O. "speaks to Asian-Americans because he'd lived amongst us in Asia and in Hawaii." And what if he never was from Hawaii? Well, no matter because "he would still be the most inspiring candidate I've ever seen," added Hu.
3

On Obama's victory, Oprah had this orgasmic reaction: "I'm vibrating." Oprah continued, declaring that the election "has been the greatest experience of my lifetime. I haven't seen a sense of unity like this since 9/11. Now, we're all brought together in the name of hope."
4

BOOK: Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation
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