Adam Smith Institute

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Obama on the attack

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Obama's media and internet savvy presidential campaign seems to have invented a powerful new tactic for the remaining weeks of the race to the White House. So far his success in this presidential campaign has rested mainly on his huge army of supporters, managed with the most advanced digital network expertise.

The list of his supporters, running into the millions, enabled him to collect huge amounts of campaign dollars and to mobilize a national volunteer network as well. However, he seems to be now mobilizing this army of supporters in order to bully adversary media outlets with his website: The Action Wire.

The technique increasingly used is known as Denial of Service Attacks, DSA, forbidden in the UK but not in the US. The effect is that normal customers are prevented from using a particular service such as media properly. And it works like this: media messages are monitored 24/7 and if anything is regarded as wrong or simply not welcome, the Obama campaign uses its awesome army of supporters, many of them left wing radicals, to hit back on the responsible media outlet. Hundreds or thousands of them will keep flooding radio and television stations with e-mails or phone calls as soon as opponents are on air or anti-Obama ads are being published. According to the Weekly Standard:

It did so as recently as Monday night, when it orchestrated a massive stream of complaints on the phone lines of Tribune Co-owned WGN-AM in Chicago when the radio station hosted author David Freddoso, who has written a controversial book about the Illinois Democrat.

So much for Obama's claims to leave behind embattled partisanship and engage in a bipartisan style of political debate.