Real unaltered photograph.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

The Obama campaign is not responsible for this.

0:43 video

The creator of the amusing anti-Hillary advertisement based on the 1984 Apple Superbowl Commercial has been identified as Philip de Vellis, an employee of Blue State Digital, an District of Columbia Internet consultancy founded by former Howard Dean campaign staffers and catering to democrats.

Blue State is working for the Obama Campaign, but Mr. de Vellis has been reported to have created the advertisement on his own initiative, and was promptly fired.

Thomas Gensemer, Managing Director of Blue State, has a
statement on the corporate web site:

This afternoon, an employee at our firm, Phillip de Vellis, received a call from Arianna Huffington of “The Huffington Post” regarding the “1984” video currently circulating online. Initially, de Vellis refused to respond to her requests. He has since acknowledged to Blue State Digital that he was the creator of the video.

Pursuant to company policy regarding outside political work or commentary on behalf of our clients or otherwise, Mr. de Vellis has been terminated from Blue State Digital effective immediately.

Blue State Digital is under contract with the Obama Campaign for technology pursuits including software development and hosting. Additionally, one of our founding partners is on leave from the company to work directly for the campaign at headquarters.

However, Blue State Digital is not currently engaged in any relationship with the Obama Campaign for creative or non-technical services.

Mr. de Vellis created this video on his own time. It was done without the knowledge of management, and was in no way tied to his work at the firm or our formal engagement [on technology pursuits] with the Obama campaign…

We wish Mr. de Vellis well in his future endeavors.

It turns out that the poor fellow was ratted out by none other than Ariana Huffington.

And Phil de Vellis says:

Hi. I’m Phil. I did it. And I’m proud of it.

I made the “Vote Different” ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it–by people of all political persuasions–will follow.

This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.

The campaigns had no idea who made it–not the Obama campaign, not the Clinton campaign, nor any other campaign. I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs.

Keep up the good work, Mr. de Vellis, is all I have to say.

The Obama campaign says they didn’t really produce this delightful anti-Hillary ad.

1:14 video

———————–

The original Superbowl Apple ad.

Hillary Clinton goes to a primary school in New York to talk about the world. After her talk she offers a question time.

One little boy puts up his hand. The Senator asks him what his name is.

“Kenneth.”

“And what is your question, Kenneth?”

“I have three questions: First – whatever happened to the medical health care plan you were paid to develop during your husband’s eight years in the office as President? Second – why would you run for President after your husband shamed the office? Third – whatever happened to all those things you took when you left the White House?”

Just then the bell rings for recess. Hillary Clinton informs the kids that they will continue after recess.

When they resume, Hillary says, “Okay, where were we? Oh, that’s right, question time. Who has a question?”

A different little boy put his hand up. Hillary asked him what his name is.

“Larry.”

“And what is your question, Larry?”

“I have five questions: First – whatever happened to the medical health care plan you were paid to develop during your husband’s eight years in the office as President? Second – why would you run for President after your husband shamed the office? Third – whatever happened to all thosethings you took when you left the White House? Fourth – why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early? Fifth – what happened to Kenneth?”

Gerard Baker, in the London Times, contemplates the dreadful horror that is Hillary.

As you consider her career this past 15 years or so in the public spotlight, it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable way in which she has pursued this ambition, and confirmed that there is literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here, finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician’s trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion.

Fifteen years ago there was once a principled, if somewhat rebarbative and unelectable politician called Hillary Rodham Clinton. A woman who aggressively preached abortion on demand and the right of children to sue their own parents, a committed believer in the power of government who tried to create a healthcare system of such bureaucratic complexity it would have made the Soviets blush; a militant feminist who scorned mothers who take time out from work to rear their children as “women who stay home and bake cookies”.

Today we have a different Hillary Rodham Clinton, all soft focus and expensively coiffed, exuding moderation and tolerance.

To grasp the scale of the transfiguration, it is necessary only to consider the very moment it began. The turning point in her political fortunes was the day her husband soiled his office and a certain blue dress. In that Monica Lewinsky moment, all the public outrage and contempt for the sheer tawdriness of it all was brilliantly rerouted and channelled to the direct benefit of Mrs Clinton, who immediately began a campaign for the Senate.

And so you had this irony, a woman who had carved out for herself a role as an icon of the feminist movement, launching her own political career, riding a wave of public sympathy over the fact that she had been treated horridly by her husband.

After that unsurpassed exercise in cynicism, nothing could be too expedient. Her first Senate campaign was one long exercise in political reconstructive surgery. It went from the cosmetic — the sudden discovery of her Jewish ancestry, useful in New York, especially when you’ve established a reputation as a friend of Palestinians— to the radical: her sudden message of tolerance for people who opposed abortion, gay marriage, gun control and everything else she had stood for.

Once in the Senate she published an absurd autobiography in which every single paragraph had been scrubbed clean of honest reflection to fit the campaign template. As a lawmaker she is remembered mostly, when confronted with a President who enjoyed 75 per cent approval ratings, for her infamous decision to support the Iraq war in October 2002. This one-time anti-war protester recast herself as a latter-day Boadicea, even castigating President Bush for not taking a tough enough line with the Iranians over their nuclear programme.

Now, you might say, hold on. Aren’t all politicians veined with an opportunistic streak? Why is she any different? The difference is that Mrs Clinton has raised that opportunism to an animating philosophy, a P. T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace.

All politicians, sadly, lie. We can often forgive the lies as the necessary price paid to win popularity for a noble cause. But the Clinton candidacy is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person who, stripped bare of the cynicism, manipulation and calculation, is nothing more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.

Martin Peretz, in New Republic, contemplates the threat to Hillary’s ambition posed by Barack Obama, and the possibility of another Clinton White House.

Hillary started out in 1993 with “the politics of meaning,” that pretentious and portentous phrase that actually means nothing. She had leapt at it out of the mouth of a foolish “rabbi,” Michael Lerner, earnest and oleaginous (he the enthusiast of tikkun olam, a theology rooted nowhere so firmly as in a Peter, Paul, and Mary song). But she dropped it quickly when she discovered that the American people were on to her preacher-teacher’s banal words. Then she peddled It Takes A Village as book and slogan. It soon appeared too soft for her own entry into politics, and so she also sidetracked this theme. But now she is running for president. Tough-minded she was on Iraq, right up there with that junior senator from Massachusetts. A few days ago, she said that, had she known what she knows now, she wouldn’t have voted for the war. Then, today, she said she wished she had voted against the war, whatever. She has fumbled and disenchanted the left, and the left is not easily forgiving. Still, as a gesture to that flank of the party, Hillary has republished It Takes A Village. But what it really takes is a majority of the electoral college. Which I don’t see.