Oh brother

With a few qualifications that I’ll discuss in a moment, this has to be the most inane idea I’ve heard all day:

Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — When 76,000 people pack Denver’s Invesco Field tomorrow to hear Senator Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, they’ll be called on to get to work.

The campaign is asking them to text-message friends and urge them to sign on as supporters of the Democratic presidential candidate. It’s part of a drive by Obama’s team to leave the national convention with hundreds of thousands of new names to add to a database that already includes millions.

Conventions have long focused on the politicians in the halls and on staging spectacles to win over passive television audiences. Obama is trying to make this the most interactive one in history and to give it a global reach. It is a natural progression for a campaign that has far outdistanced Democratic and Republican rivals in using the Internet to recruit supporters and raise record sums of cash.

However, as I said, I will qualify my opinion here. If Obama really just wants the names and numbers (i.e. the identities) of “hundreds of thousands” of people to a secret dem-lib database in which the entire lives of American citizens are monitored by socialist over-lords, well, then I think Obama’s on to something because there are plenty of idiots out there who are more than happy to have Obama convince them that they are the “We” in his “we are the change we have been waiting for” routine.

But seriously, I will lose all respect for anyone thinking about “texting” in the name of The One.

Filed under: Media, Politics