Anti-Clinton Ad Linked to Obama Campaign Tech

March 21, 2007— -- The presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was rocked by revelations Wednesday night that one of its contracted employees was the creator of a scathing YouTube video against his opponent Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., despite Obama's insistance that he had nothing to do with it.

Phil de Vellis, until Wednesday an employee of the company that handles Obama's Web site, boasted in a posting on the Huffington Post that he made the ad, though he claimed neither the Obama campaign nor his former employer, Blue State Digital -- which does software development and hosting for Obama's campaign -- was aware that he had.

"The specific point of the ad was that Obama represents a new kind of politics, and that Senator Clinton's 'conversation' is disingenuous," de Vellis wrote of the critical ad that uses an Apple computer TV ad to make Clinton appear like Big Brother. "And the underlying point was that the old political machine no longer holds all the power."

"This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last," de Vellis wrote ominously. "The game has changed."

The admission threatened to besmirch Obama's pledge to run a clean campaign that doesn't attack his opponents, not to mention statements Obama made earlier this week about the ad.

Obama told CNN's Larry King Monday night that "in some ways, it's the democratization of the campaign process. But it's not something that we had anything to do with or were aware of, and that frankly, given what it looks like, we don't have the technical capacity to create something like this."

Wednesday evening the Obama campaign issued a statement, saying, "The Obama campaign and its employees had no knowledge and had nothing to do with the creation of the ad. We were notified this evening by a vendor of ours, Blue State Digital, that an employee of the company had been involved in the making of this ad. Blue State Digital has separated ties with this individual and we have been assured he did no work on our campaign's account."