In the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt . . .

Obama to Supporters: Hey, Let’s Spam All the Republicans You Know!
Oh, this is reassuring. The Obama campaign wants its grassroots supporters to make donations in the name of Republicans they know and are irked by – and they promise to send a gloating e-mail to that Republican if you provide their address.
At the White House Dossier, Keith Koffler observes, “The Obama information collection effort is cast under the mischievous guise of asking Obama supporters to ‘have a little fun at the expense of a Republican in your life’ by signing them up to get an email from the Obama campaign ribbing them for having ‘inspired’ the Obama supporter to donate. The result, however, is that the Obama campaign gets a new trove of Republican email addresses that it could never have collected through voluntary submissions.”
James Taranto wonders if Obama is leading us or stalking us: “Somewhere along the line, somebody signed us up for the Barack Obama campaign emails. Normally we don’t care for spam, political or otherwise, but these are so odd that we’ve kept them coming out of curiosity. Some of them have a stalker-like quality, plaintive yet vaguely menacing in their persistence, such as the one we noted in September titled ‘James, can we meet for dinner?’ If you don’t like it, you can always unsubscribe. But now the campaign is turning the creepiness up a notch.”
I haven’t felt this disturbed since White House Miscommunications Director Linda Douglass started following my Twitter feed . . . in a car.
Nice Deb marvels at the mentality that generated this idea:
I’m beyond caring what the regime does with our emails. Scores of conservatives have already turned themselves in at Attackwatch. What are they going to do?
But I do care that the President of the United States thinks it’s cute to cause fellow Americans distress at Christmastime by inspiring supporters to donate to his reelection campaign in their names. It’s not cute, and it’s not funny. Family members will fight and friendships will be lost over this. What person in their right mind would do something like this to someone they like? Wouldn’t it have to be someone they don’t like? So the Obama camp is purposefully egging on their followers’ basest instincts to hurt people during the holidays?
Whatever – it’s purposely divisive and it will cause additional stress to many people who already are feeling stressed out this holiday season.
Have we ever seen anything like this at this level of politics, before?
Alternatively, I might credit the Obama campaign for knowing the psychology of their grassroots supporters. They’re FURIOUS that some people disagree with them and want to punish them somehow. Dissent stopped being patriotic on January 20, 2009, apparently.
Sister Toldjah sees this as fueling the worst impulses of the Obamamessiah worshippers: “What does bother me, though, is what I am sure will be the gleeful enthusiasm of a certain core of Obama voters who will be all too happy to report their neighbors and colleagues who stand in the way of ‘community’ and Hope and Change . . . or whatever slogan they’re pushing this time. Those kind of people make me nervous. You know, the kind of people who form a children’s choir to sing the praises of Dear Leader. Those folks worry me.”
At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey finds it more pathetic than menacing: “Basically, this says We’re jerks who want to spam unwilling recipients, so why don’t you betray your friends and help us out? Hey, if that’s what Hopeandchange looks like in 2012, well, bring it on. As campaign strategies go, it’s on par with New Coke and those Miller Lite ads that imply that men who choose other brands might be a little light in the loafers . . . So what is the purpose of this campaign? Besides basic mean-spiritedness, it’s probably just to compile as big a list of e-mail addresses as possible for the general election. They needed independents and disaffected Republican voters in 2008 to win, and it makes sense that they’d want to get a subset of e-mail addresses for targeted messaging on that score. That doesn’t mean it will work, however, as thousands of Nigerian princes and Russian mail-order brides could tell you.”
Hey, Ed, Nigerian princes and Russian mail-order brides were some of the biggest donors to the 2008 Obama campaign.
Patrick Ruffini sees an unforced error on the part of the president’s camp: “That last Obama campaign email was a bonehead move thought up by a hyper-partisan in Finance and contrary to Obama’s core brand.”
The Daily Pundit wonders, “Would the use of email addresses harvested in this fashion constitute violation of CAN-SPAM? Can we ding Obama’s campaign for $500 per email every time they engage in this wonderful violation of people’s rights to opt-in and opt-out their own emails?”