The netroots — the diehard lefty bloggers — have been grumbling for a while that Illinois senator Barack Obama may not be their guy. Now, a vocal breakup between the campaign and their volunteer coordinator for the campaign’s MySpace page will likely exacerbate that rift.

This left side of the blogosphere has been buzzing about this story, revealing the backstory to a sudden change in management of the candidate’s page, where at one point 160,000 “friends” had signed on with Obama.

Back in 2004, paralegal Joe Anthony saw Obama’s convention speech and was impressed, so he set up a MySpace page for Obama fans. He had no contact with Obama or his Senate campaign; he started the effort as a fan.

This year, the Obama presidential campaign came a-calling, and for several weeks, all was rosy between them and Anthony as their volunteer MySpace coordinator. But his workload grew as more people started paying attention to the campaign, and he wanted to be paid for his work. Sometime during the negotiations, the campaign decided they wanted to handle the MySpace page in-house. Anthony calls the campaign team “bullies” and says that they jerked him around the last few weeks. The campaign contends that Anthony started to make errors, and they were nervous about an unknown volunteer handling a high-profile platform for the candidate.

They asked him for a figure for a one-time fee before they took over management of the site. He asked for $39,000, plus asked that if any fees were to be paid to MySpace by the campaign up to that point in time, those should be shared with him, up to $10,000. The Obama campaign said they couldn’t afford that.

This is not going over well among the young, lefty, and techie, as Micah Sifry, co-founder and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum and a frequent writer on politics and technology, notes, “campaigns like theirs regularly give tens of thousands of dollars to highpriced media consultants who would give their eye-teeth to deliver 160,000 rabid activists to a campaign.”

The Obama campaign went to MySpace administrators, asked them to lock out Anthony, and took over management of the site. The administrators said they will add the 160,000 “friends” who signed up on the site to whatever new page Anthony sets up. Anthony says now that Obama has lost his vote.

What to make of all this? Obviously, some ordinary folks are more fluent in these emerging technologies than many campaign professionals, and that these gung-ho tech-heads are going to be the first to utilize them. The next great get-out-the-vote tool is probably being tweaked far from the headquarters of a major campaign by some guy in a makeshift home office, while his mother or spouse yells at him for spending all his waking hours on the Internet.

Still, despite the inevitable outrage of the netroots, it’s hard to get too angry at the Obama campaign. Lots of campaigns utilize volunteers, but very few use volunteer spokesmen, or a position of comparable power as the one Anthony found himself in. There’s just too much risk involved. (For a worst case scenario, think of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Scranton, whose campaign manager declared that rival Lynn Swann was “the rich white guy in this race.” Swann, in case you’ve forgotten, is black.)

Did Anthony deserve compensation for his previous volunteer work? Well, that’s the thing — it was volunteer work. It would be nice for the campaign to compensate him for his work on behalf of the candidate, but since they never asked, they’re not obligated to pay him.

This whole case demonstrates why a volunteer is actually a risky choice for a campaign to work with: He’s got nothing to lose, as this isn’t his job or his profession. A professional campaign spokesman or staffer who went off the reservation and criticized his boss would be fired, and would have a hard time finding additional work after that. With a volunteer, the first moment they feel things aren’t being done the way they should, they’ve got little incentive to not air the dirty laundry all over the Internet.

The unrestrained passion of a volunteer and the needs of a professional presidential campaign are a volatile mix. One could have seen a similar situation developing with John Edwards and his lifted-from-the-netroots bloggers, had they remained with his campaign, even though they were compensated. The culture of the netroots — often (though not always) young, in-your-face, fight-the-power counter-culturalists doesn’t mesh well with the everybody-stay-on-message-and-do-as-you’re-told discipline of a presidential campaign.

– Jim Geraghty writes “The Hillary Spot” blog on National Review Online.