Obama '12 Email Offer: Get Your $15 "Long Form" Mug
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, May 18 2011
The Obama '12 operation hit some portion of its email list with a fundraising ask that can probably fairly be called rather cheeky: for $15, according to one version of the email, you can get yourself a mug featuring Obama's long form birth certificate. On the reverse, there's a smiling Obama with the tag line "Made in the USA."
It's the sort of engagement with the campaign's base, or some segment of it, that Ari Melber was calling for back in late April, though the passage of time probably creates slightly less dissonance between the campaign making money off of the birth certificate situation and Obama's calls to move past it. They've found a timely hook, though: today's release of Jerome Corsi's book called, yes, "Where's the Birth Certificate?" They get to look in on the joke, as it were, part of the modern media mix, and aggressive. Not to mention the chance to raise some cash; for twenty-five bucks, you can get the same image on a t-shirt.
The full email from Deputy Campaign Manager Julianna Smoot is after the jump.
Update: Melber has his take on the push, suggesting that "the timing feels a bit off."
Let me introduce you to Jerome Corsi.
This week he released a new book that the publisher says will be a bestseller "of historic proportions."
The title is "Where's the Birth Certificate?" -- yes, really.
Corsi's work is a greatest-hits reel of delusions, ranging from 9/11 conspiracies to claiming that there is an infinite supply of oil in the Earth's core. In 2008, he published a book about Barack Obama claiming, among other things, that he (a) is a secret Muslim; (b) is secretly anti-military; (c) secretly dealt drugs; and (d) secretly supported terrorist actions when he was eight years old. So many secrets!
FactCheck.org called Corsi's work "a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods."
There's really no way to make this stuff completely go away. The only thing we can do is laugh at it -- and make sure as many other people as possible are in on the joke.
So let's just do this -- get your Obama birth certificate mug here:
https://donate.barackobama.com/USA-Made-Mug
Last year, the President said, "I can't spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead."
This is about as close as we can get.
If the facts can't make these ridiculous smears go away, we can at least have a little fun with it.
And then we'll get back to the important work of supporting the President as he tackles real problems like high gas prices, the deficit, and unemployment.
Thanks,
Julianna
Julianna Smoot
Deputy Campaign Manager
Obama for America