Like a great many folks who found themselves caught up in the wave of Obama fever that permeated the Internet in 2008, I’m still a part of the mailing lists that were used to drive the President’s (amazingly well-financed) 2008 grassroots campaign. In the intervening three years, I’ve dutifully remained on that list, a fact borne as much out of laziness as my hope for some niblet of insider-y information that presidents are well-known to share with a mailing list of a few million strangers ahead of the rest of the world.
As such, I’ve dutifully clicked through a handful of – and deleted far more – emails from the ghosts of that campaign, Davids Axelrod and Plouffe, and so on. Typically, the emails have been a mundane recounting of some legislative event or a call for donations to help defeat the latest proposal to use the teeth of the poor to line John Boehner’s tear-filled swimming pool.
On Wednesday of this week, when an email appeared from a staffer whose name I didn’t recognize, titled “You’ll Like This One”, I figured, ‘”Eh, what the hell?” That sentiment quickly changed to “Oh, what the hell?!”
The President’s campaign, in their infinite wisdom, is selling trinkets! Apparently, they’re in the “create and capitalize your own meme” business. For $15 I could buy a “Made in the USA” coffee mug bearing Obama’s picture and a print of the birth certificate. Twenty-five bones will net you a t-shirt with the same images. The items are made in the United States, for which I give them credit. I suppose I should also give them credit for beating the Etsy community to the endeavor.
In fairness, the President’s reelection campaign is far from the first to sell t-shirts and other candidate paraphernalia as a way of raising funds, and they certainly won’t be the last. I get it; people like getting something for their money, and if they can’t have gay marriage, well, a coffee mug should do just fine.
But, it’s one thing to brand your name and visage on a t-shirt, reminding folks that you exist, and build your war chest in the process. Were this to come out of a wholly separate, self-funded organization who was doing this for kicks and a little charity, that would be another. It’s a completely different thing altogether to decide to draw out a long standing conspiracy theory, even in a mocking way, only weeks after saying yourself, “We do not have time for this kind of silliness.”
I guess when you kick off your re-election campaign some 18 months in advance, maybe your staffers DO have time for “this kind of silliness.”
When such silliness is putting money in the coffers, apparently the campaign has all the time in the world. There’s no word yet on whether or not campaign stops this summer or next will including dunking booths and opportunities to pay $5 to watch Joe Biden chug a beer. Perhaps that is too silly for the man in charge. I’m not really sure what the line is anymore.
Photo via Marc Nozell used under a Creative Commons license.
