"How Obama’s Online Activists Changed This Morning’s Democratic Debate"

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I don’t like announcing winners of debates, but one winner I will announce from this morning’s debate are Obama’s online activists.

At this morning’s debate, George Stephanopolous challenged Hillary Clinton on her claim that Presidents shouldn’t discuss hypotheticals when considering the use of nuclear weapons. He actually played a video tape of an interview she did on Bloomberg television where she said she would take nuclear weapons off the table. Clinton said she wasn’t talking about a hypothetical, but Obama was. Obama responded that there is nothing hypothetical about Al Qaeda being in the hills of Pakistan–it was in the NIE report and every foreign policy expert agrees on that. Obama won that debate.

This question may never had been asked though were it not for Obama’s online activists. The story of Clinton’s comments on Iran were floating around for at least two or three days in the Obama blogosphere before any mainstream media outlet ever picked it up. I know because I read about it and a few people were screaming, “Why aren’t the media saying anything about this??!” I’m not sure who found the quote but I saw it first on IrishAmericansforObama.com. I’m not sure where they got it from.

Beth Fouhy from the AP picked it up and began reporting it. It’s hard for me to believe the AP would have done the research to find that quote if they had not been tipped off because of the frequent comments popping up about it in the blogosphere. I saw Chris Matthews discuss it on Hardball and he attributed it to Beth Fouhy at the AP. However, I saw the news on some Obama sites at least two days before Beth Fouhy’s article ever came out.

My point is to congratulate whoever found that quote and put it out there. It was a minor, but important victory. The movement toward changing this country is not going to fall on Obama alone. We all have to get in using whatever talents and resources we have to all jointly make it happen.