YOUTUBE.COM
BIG SISTER? A video that supports presidential candidate Barack Obama depicts rival Hillary Rodham Clinton as a Big Brother figure.
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Anti-Clinton ad is linked to Obama
Associated Press
WASHINGTON » The mysterious creator of the Orwellian YouTube ad against Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Democratic operative who worked for a digital consulting firm with ties to rival Sen. Barack Obama.
Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, acknowledged in an interview that he was the creator of the video, which portrayed Clinton as a Big Brother figure and urged support for the Hawaii-born Obama's presidential campaign.
De Vellis, 33, said he resigned from the firm yesterday after he learned that he was about to be unmasked by HuffingtonPost.com., a liberal news and opinion Internet site.
Blue State designed Obama's Web site, and one of the firm's founding members, Joe Rospars, took a leave from the company to work as Obama's director of new media. The connection to the campaign is likely to be a setback for Obama, D-Ill., who has cultivated an image as a politician who wants to rise above bare-knuckle politics.
"It's true. ... Yeah, it's me," de Vellis said last night.
He said he produced the ad outside of work and that neither Blue State nor the Obama campaign was aware of his role in the ad.
Thomas Gensemer, managing director of Blue State Digital, said de Vellis was fired.
In its own statement, the Obama camp said the campaign "had no knowledge and had nothing to do with the creation of the ad."
The ad was guerrilla politics at its cleverest and had become the boffo hit of the YouTube Web site.
The 74-second clip, a copy of a 1984 Apple ad for its Macintosh computer, has recorded nearly 1.5 million views, with an enormous surge in the past two days. The video's final image reads, "BarackObama.com."
De Vellis remained hidden for weeks, protected by the anonymity afforded by YouTube and the absence of federal regulations governing most Internet political speech.
The ad portrayed Clinton on a huge television screen addressing robotic humans in a stark, futuristic hall. A female athlete tosses a hammer at the screen, destroying Clinton's image with an explosive flash.