If I were a cynical man, I’d say this is less the latest in a consistent First Amendment jurisprudence or a courageous defense of animal rights, and more a custom-ordered talking point for the Sunday morning talking heads. “What do you mean Obama is entitled to pick a justice as liberal as Bush’s justices were conservative? Look at Alito just this week!”

“The House Republican brand is so bad right now that if it were a dog food, they’d take it off the shelf.”

Of course, Barack’s coattails are longer than Hillary’s, so it’s a fair assumption that he’d have a friendlier Congress than she would. Can we just finish up this primary?

A couple days ago, I was walking around campus, putting up posters for the Open Net Initiative‘s book release party (it’s this Friday, you should go). I soon came to a bulletin board without enough free space for my flier. Not wanting to incur bad karma for covering up any fliers for events that hadn’t occurred yet, yet also not wanting to rearrange the whole board, I was lucky to find one little 8.5×11″ ad that happened to be for Hillary Clinton, presumably posted by HLS for Hillary. Now, clearly the Democratic primary is still a-churnin’, but Massachusetts voted more than a month ago (and Hillary won, I might add!). I couldn’t believe that such an outdated poster was still up when everything else on the board advertised a current event. Happily, I stuck my poster up, covering most of Hillary’s, and went on my way…This morning, maybe thirty-six hours after I’d put my posters up around campus, I happened to pass by the Hillary bulletin board again. This time, I couldn’t help but notice, my poster wasn’t where I’d hung it. Instead, it appeared, someone had carefully rearranged the entire board to occupy every square inch. Up in one corner was my Berkman flier; in the very center, I swear almost gleaming, was the Hillary ad.

These people do not give up.

It looks like the real thing, I guess (though Barack would never stoop to Times New Roman). Actually, it looks a little too close — the site’s images are ripped from the campaign’s official page. It offers a realistic-looking form to sign you up for some email list. Sure, it’s a little unseemly that a candidate’s fundraiser would include Google AdSense. But the real weirdness starts when you click “donate.” Donatetoobama.org doesn’t make it very easy for users to donate. Eschewing Paypal and Google Checkout, let alone the Obama campaign’s official donation form, the site offers only an address in Bellingham, Washington, for mailing checks. “Please have your check made out to: Concerned Citizens For Obama,” it politely requests. So what’s the deal with Concerned Citizens for Obama?

It’s certainly not easy to tell from the group’s web presence, which appears to consist solely of www.donatetobarackobama.com (an alias of  donatetoobama.org). Interesting, though it’s not hard to imagine in this age of astroturf that such a group might comprise only one “concerned citizen.” At this point, hoping to learn more, I wondered what Concerned Citizen was running this site. A whois search shows that the domain name is registered to a private individual, with the same address given on the donation page. Punching the site into a reverse IP lookup engine, the same server hosting donatetoobama.org appears to also host donatetogiuliani.com, donatetotothompson.com, and hillaryclintonrevealed.net, among nonpolitical sites. Needless to say, the information “revealed” on that last site is not very favorable to Sen. Clinton.

Searching for the domain name on Google, I turned up a blog apparently belonging to the same person, hosted at hillarylied.blogspot.com. The post that turned up in the search results describes the blogger’s motivation for creating his various Obama sites:

The best way I can help this country is to try and help Obama win the Democratic party nomination. I’m starting to like this guy … say what you want about his policy stances, etc., I certainly don’t agree with much of his positions -

But that being said, at least he is honest, and is forthcoming about what he wants to do. Whatever the direction, clarity of purpose will go a long way right now. Our feds are so corrupt at this point in our history, that the simple honesty and intelligence of this man might be just what the Dr. ordered.

. . .

Check out the websites I am building for him. It’s just a start on a homepage, but within the month, it will be complete. Here are the URL’s they will appear on:

http://www.donatetoobama.org/ (current layout rough draft)
http://www.donatetobarackobama.com/ , & .org
http://www.hillaryclintonrevealed.net/ (current)
http://hillarylied.blogspot.com/ (current and growing)
http://www.hillarylied.org/ (coming soon)

So, if I understand correctly, he’s not a big fan of Obama’s political positions, but he likes the guy personally, enough to raise money for him. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with what he’s doing — it’s perfectly legitimate to support a candidate for any reason at all, even if you don’t like his political party, and some political donations are protected speech — but it still seems kind of strange. It’s possible that “Concerned Citizens for Obama” was a project that never got off the ground (the blog post is from March, 2007), and I’m willing to give the site’s owner the benefit of the doubt. Nevertheless, if you’re thinking about sending some money to Barack, I’d recommend sending it directly to his campaign by using his official site.

I love the Change Congress initiative. But as nearly as I can tell, it hasn’t really gotten off the ground (even change-congress.org has yet to launch). While jumping into the special election would have gained the nascent movement cheap publicity, it would come at the cost of credibility once Lessig lost. Forced to fundraise before he could ever publicize his anti-special interest message, that message might be dramatically undercut before the word ever got out. Even if he could win, the life of a freshman Congressman doesn’t admit much time for the kind of management that Prof. Lessig would need to do to grow his organization. Just like his earlier project, Creative Commons, I think he could be most effective as a professor, not a politician.

(While we’re on the subject of cheap publicity for the Change Congress movement, though, well, last week’s evidence indicates that a move back to Harvard would do the trick…)