Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation Read Free

and David Plouffe, knew that the youth vote, steadily increasing since 2000, could play a major role in the '08 election. And they guessed right, creating the most coordinated, directed, interactive youth effort in modern history.
    Team Obama set up "camps" around the country to train students to engage the youth vote on their campuses, equipping them with "the nuts and bolts of presidential campaigning." 14 So complete was the Obama campaign's obsession with lobotomizing the youth demographic that the cash-flushed Obama campaign even bought ads in video games, such as Guitar Hero and Madden NFL 09. As one campaign staffer bragged, "when you're buying commercials in video games, you truly are being well-funded." 15
    But the truly big money was spent on dominating college campuses with an unprecedented youth outreach effort. Team Obama's "youth consultants" soaked university campuses with radio and television advertising. 16 They had more than five thousand paid field organizers overall, in addition to the Obama boot camps that were organized around the country. 17
    Barack's mastery of new media and technology created an online presence that did far more than release campaign talking points; itwas an interactive hub that identified and connected supporters with each other, encouraged community blogs, generated field material for door-to-door peer interaction, and stacked volunteers to man phone banks. Then there was the cutthroat community organizing and the Students for Obama chapters that sprouted up on every major campus nationwide (one thousand in all). And how about those youthful gestures--"brush the dirt off your shoulder" reference comes to mind--which included the fist bumps, the three-on-three basketball tournaments, the DJs, and the ubiquitous assumption that Obama was, well, one cool cat. After all, Dear Leader uses a BlackBerry, we were told! Stop the presses! All the components were assembled to churn out the Zombies.
    And churn out the Zombies they did. When Obama appeared before Super Tuesday outside the MTV studio, eighteen-year-old Michael Madison confessed his bro-mance with B.H.O. "I am a straight man completely in love with Barack Obama," he said. "In 2004, I heard him give a speech at the Democratic National Convention. I fell in love and I've been in love ever since." 18
    A student from Garden City, New York, who was also outside the MTV studio said, "The way he makes you feel, it's like when you're going to pick up a girl for a date." 19
    Most of us would agree that a politician shouldn't make you feel like you're on a hot date.
    But tell that to blogger Michael Whack, at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. On O's website, in the community blogs section, we find this bit of reportage of Michael's encounter with Obama's radiant aura during a rope line appearance. After seeing a gentleman shake hands with Obama, Michael experienced the following:

As the guy drew back his hand I asked him, "You shook his hand didn't you?" Happily the guy said "Yes." I then said, "give me some of that" and the guy shook my hand with the same hand he had just clasped with Barack's. A woman friend of mine who was standing next to me saw me shake hands with the guy. I turned to her and said "He [the guy] just shook hands with Barack," to which she responded . . . "Hey, give it up." We then shook hands. . . . This chain of hand shakes went on for about five or six more persons. . . . I felt some solidarity with this stranger, consummated by a handshake and signifying some unspoken agreement presumably about Barack Obama and his core message of UNITY! 20

    Nauseated? If so, you're probably one of those conservative racists. Either that or you're just not stylish and down with the coolness, yo.
    Mark Buhrmester, young Obama supporter, had an honest observation: "Having a hip candidate like him makes it difficult to support someone else. Barack Obama is in style, so if you don't support Barack Obama, it's like you're not