Volunteer oppo
The Palin pick took everyone by surprise, but Democrats in general and the Obama camp in particular have a real advantage this cycle: A massive, distributed opposition research network composed of thousands of supporters around the country and in Alaska.
Reporters were immediately deluged with e-mail on everything from the doubts about Palin's opposition to the "Bridge to Nowhere" to the sort of stuff that, unproven, doesn't belong in print.
The upside of this is that the elements of Palin's record that are available online have been scoured with a speed that would otherwise have been unthinkable. And the Obama campaign can legitimately deny that it's the source of much of the oppo.
But there's potential for backlash. The McCain campaign — which has been searching, in vain, for months for opportunities to claim a victimhood equivalent to that imposed on Obama by viral e-mails — now has its own smear campaign to protest, and to beat back.
Indeed, the similarities between one set of attacks on Palin and on Obama are striking: They're demanding to see a birth certificate, and basing theories on arguments about what's available online, rather than supplementing that with offline research and interviews.
It's striking — and no doubt comp lit papers will be written on this in the future — the similarities between the theories that go viral, and the degree to which they seem to be thrown primarily to black and female candidates. Contrast the sheer volume of online conspiracy theorizing about Obama, Clinton, and (already) Palin to the relative absence of such theories about McCain and John Edwards, whose scandal was left to the old print tabloids to unearth.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0908/Volunteer_oppo.html
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