.com Dish

For more than two years, LA-based Barack Obama supporter Joe Anthony has created, nurtured and grown the Obama MySpace page. Barack’s team was initially okay with Anthony owning and running the page. Anthony freely gave them editorial access to the site.

The recent explosion in popularity of the Obama ‘08 MySpace page has led the Obama campaign to decide to run the site internally. “We were concerned about an outsider having control of the content and responses going out under Obama’s name,” said an Obama campaigner.

Anthony understood their concern, and he also understood the value of the 160,000 MySpace friends the Obama site has amassed. Evidently, so did the Obama camp. They asked Anthony to suggest a one-time consulting fee in exchange for turning the profile over to the Obama camp. After calculating the time he put into the profile, Anthony requested $39,000 plus the sharing of any fees the campaign paid to MySpace up to $10,000. Or a job with the campaign, continuing to do what he has been doing for them, since 2004.

In a rare display of disloyalty by the Obama campaign, it told Anthony that they did not have the money. They went on to accuse Anthony of being a “squatter” and attempting to gouge them. Ultimately, the campaign circumvented Anthony by having MySpace seize the profile. MySpace has settled the dispute by granting Anthony rights to the contact information, and granted Obama the rights to the MySpace site that bears his name, as of Monday night, May 7th.

It should be pointed out that Obama’s campaign raised nearly $26 million during the first three months of this year and spent about $6.6 million, according to campaign finance records. About $7 million of the campaign’s donations came in online, campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. You’d think Barack Obama would be willing to pay one of his loyal supporters the equivalent of seven-tenths of one percent of the online donations for Anthony’s yeoman’s job on the MySpace site.

At the very least, $49,000.00 is very little money to pay to engender some good will. Or at least pay Anthony to continue to do for the Obama campaign what he has done for them, since 2004.