(1) It has been argued that Obama’s campaign has not been harmed because his deletion of the offending material prevents us from using it further against him. This argument has the following defects.
(a) It has been accepted for centuries that the side that leaves the battlefield, whether physical or political, to keep from getting hurt is the loser. The side that has possession of the field when the sun goes down is the winner, and we have possession of the field. Obama had to give ground by modifying his Web site in direct response to our actions. When a contestant must modify his actions in response to such pressure he has, as Helmuth von Moltke would put it, “submitted to the law of the opponent.” We won, Obama lost, end of story.
(b) The hate speech has all been downloaded, and we can still propagate it under Obama’s name and picture.
(c) Whatever damage Obama mitigated by deleting Wicher’s material is offset by the implicit admission that this material has hurt his campaign badly. The first rule of swimming with sharks is not to get bitten. The second rule is, if you do get bitten, don’t show it by bleeding. The Obama campaign’s blood is in the water, and now is the time for a feeding frenzy. We must intensify this line of attack with the material we have already archived along with whatever else we might find at my.barackobama.com.
(d) We can now proclaim that Obama threw the Network of Spiritual Progressives under the bus, i.e. use Obama’s deletion of Tony Wicher’s Blog for Peace to humiliate some of Obama’s constituency.
(2) Obama’s supporters may argue that his deletion of this material shows that he did the right thing. We remind them, and our readers, that Wicher was posting this kind of material for more than a year, and Obama’s staff acted on it only after it became an Internet-wide scandal–just like the New Black Panther Party page at my.barackobama.com. We also remind our readers that Obama “rejected” Louis Farrakhan’s support only after Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton cornered him on national television. Obama gave ground on Wicher and the other hate mongers only because the aforementioned blogs and bloggers cornered him as well. Doing the right thing only because one gets caught and cornered doesn’t count.
I recall that in 2004 Bush garnered 60,000,000 total votes. It's starting to look as though the winner this November may garner a nationwide vote TOTAL in the high hundreds.
Are there any “techies” on our side who can recover the deleted files? It would be a good thing if someone did so.