Andrew Breitbart's Blob Journalism

Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com is on quite a roll. First it drew ACORN into the media and congressional spotlight, and now it's the source for the top trending post on the ratings site Technorati. The 11-day old blog is a fascinating case study in how the right's new media ecosystem is functioning these days -- and the hope that by exploiting the web's ability to glom claim upon claim, it can eventually, perhaps quickly, get to Barack Obama.

Breitbart, a Matt Drudge protege, launched his group blog on just September 10th, but he's already shown a remarkable ability to set the conservative media agenda. Breitbart wasted no time going after ACORN, and scored quickly with both the House and Senate turning on the grassroots organization. His latest coup: a conference call in which the White House participated where grant recipients from the National Endowment for the Arts were encouraged to make art with a political focus, "whether it's health care, education, the environment," as a call organizer put it. The idea of the White House seemingly pushing for the creation of political art by artists it funds is a decent story on its own merits.

But what Breitbart is after isn't simply a good story. He's interested in using his brand-new blog and media contacts to paint, layer by layer, brushstroke by brushstroke, a picture of the irredeemable corruption of the Obama Administration, of the left, of the labor movement, of community organizers, and of post-1960s progressive culture in general -- something in which the web is proving to be a somewhat ideal assistant.

One of the many BigGovernment.com posts on the situation makes that ambition plain, going with the unsubtle title of "The Obama/ACORN/NEA Connection." That "connection"? One of the White House participants on the call was Buffy Wicks, who also once worked for WakeUpWalmart.com, which carries the double-whammy, in BigGovernment's eyes, of being both a union organizing group and having once partnered with ACORN. In the White House, Wicks works for the Office of Public Engagement. Her boss there is Valerie Jarrett, and we all know Jarret is Barack Obama's best friend. What's more, Wicks and Jarrett oversee the Serve.gov community service site, a site that, as a BigGovernment blogger pointed out, on occasion points potential volunteers to opportunities with ACORN. Rush Limbaugh boiled down the construct on his show last night, "Buffy Wicks works under Valerie Jarrett, who is at the right hand of Barack Obama, The Almighty."

And at a deeper level, Wicks, as a field organizer for the Obama campaign, was something of a community organizer. As was Obama, and you know who else was a community organizer? Van Jones. And as Sarah Palin famously informed Americans at the 2008 Republican National Convention, being a "community organizer" is a suspect way to spend one's time.

That those connections seem tenuous upon consideration doesn't really doesn't matter all that much in the new media ecosystem. ACORN is suspect. The National Endowment for the Arts is suspect. Organizing for America is suspect. Serve.gov is suspect. Now Wicks, and by extension, Obama's inner circle, are suspect. For the flip side of the web's ability to disseminate information as never before possible is that it isn't so accomplished (yet) at helping us appreciate scale.

On the web, Wicks is now, for the moment, Public Enemy Number One. On the web, she, a mid-level White House staffer, comes across as just about as important a figure as Jarrett, the president's closest confidante. Same goes for Jones, a policy advisor in one of the White House's many satellite offices. The web's ignorance of scale is why it doesn't matter if the ACORN video kids visited 5 offices or 55 offices before they got the goods: an incriminating YouTube-friendly video clip. The cost to them was little more than a few bus tickets. What reason does someone have not to go after ACORN or Wicks, when video cameras cost a few hundred bucks and the web's boundless resources are mostly free? There's not doubt someone culling through Wicks' every recorded statement right this minute, trying to create the moment that she becomes an unacceptable liability to the White House. If Wicks doesn't pan out, then on to the next.

And for another thing, the churn rate to online "scandals" is mind-blowing. Of course, we've had presidential scandals and witch hunts since we've had presidents. But the speed of developments is measured now in days, if not hours and minutes -- if not seconds.

The first Whitewater allegations were in 1992, and Bill Clinton wasn't impeached until six full years later. Of course, the scope here is smaller, but it still is striking that it took mere weeks to take down Jones and just a few days to get ACORN's funding pulled in Congress. The NEA phone call at the heart of this latest blowup was known about and made a mini splash back in August. It didn't stick the first time around. But Breitbart resurrected it in the wake of his ACORN scalp-taking. He added the hook of the new Wicks-ACORN connection, and it stuck. More than sticking, it went viral. BigGovernment.com launched its campaign against Wicks only yesterday, timed to break just before 9 a.m. Sean Hannity's FoxNews program was running the story just 12 hours later. A picture of Wicks -- let's face it, an obscure executive branch staffer few Americans had every heard of -- is front and center on RushLimbaugh.com this morning, with a seemingly random Organizing for America health care logo thrown in for good measure.

There's something about the way the new media ecosystem is working in this whole Van Jones-ACORN-Buffy Wicks-Valerie Jarrett-Barack Obama affair that is reminiscent of the game called Blob played in school gym class. In Blob, you run around attempting to pull people into a swelling organism. With enough time, you win. Eventually, as was the case with Whitewater -- where a real estate investigation led to Paula Jones, who led to Monica Lewinsky, who led to the inability of Clinton to govern -- you accumulate enough for your side to simply swamp your opponent. As the end game of Blob, detailed on one education website, illustrates: "This continues until there is a blob which is hard to escape."