Yesterday, the Obama campaign launched Attack Watch, a new website in the tradition of Fight The Smears, a 2008 effort to push back on misleading and erroneous stories about Obama floating around in the days before the election.
The concept of the Attack Watch website is simple — see something you think is false, send it in, and the Obama campaign will debunk it. Discussion of the site was so popular on Twitter Wednesday that it reached #3 on the service’s top trending topics in the nation. But driving the conversation wasn’t the debunking of headlines that could make it harder for Obama to win a second term — it was a TweetDeck blur of conservative tweets mocking the concept that pushed the site’s #AttackWatch hashtag near the top of the trending list.
Online and off, Republicans said the hijacking of #AttackWatch amounted to a rollout fail by the usually tech-savvy Obama campaign. Obama critics never liked Fight The Smears in 2008, and it was thanks to widespread criticism on the right that a similar White House-based program was shutdown during the health care debate.
Reporters picked up on the hashtag debacle. Over at The Hill‘s TwitterRoom blog, the headline proclaimed the #AttackWatch hashtag had “backfired” on Obama thanks to the thousands of mocking tweets that took over Twitter Wednesday.
Not so, says the Obama campaign. Team Obama told TPM that that “over 100,000 supporters” signed up in the first 24 hours after the AttackWatch rollout and that those folks “will take the lead spreading the truth in their communities, a powerful resource we’ll be able to deploy again and again over the next 14 months as the President’s detractors continue to distort his record with increasing audacity.”
It’s the number of users who join the Attack Watch team, and the ability of the site to refute bad headlines for Obama — and not the popularity of the hashtag on Twitter — that will be used to judge the effectiveness of the site, a campaign source told TPM.
Team Obama seemed to welcome the conservative attacks on their hashtag.
“I’m encouraged by the rightwing opposition to @attackwatch,” tweeted the campaign’s battleground states director Mitch Stewart. “Get the facts and fight the smears.”
