UPDATE: A-ha! Mystery solved. And rather hilariously so…
Please forgive us the levity, but sometimes things just strike us as funny here at CCP. This piece from Red State is one of those times. Apparently, the famed Obama tech wizards couldn’t get themselves together enough to purchase the eponymous domain name for the new progressive 501(c)(4) lobbying organization Organizing for Action:
The result is that Organizingforaction.net, Organizingforaction.com and Organizingforaction.org have all been registered to some enterprising individuals who snapped up the domains on January 18, the day the news broke about the new group. The people listed as the contacts didn’t respond to e-mails asking them what they intend to do with domains.
Given that yours truly recently sent out a press notice on the creation of the group and called it by one of the other OFA acronyms — there are so many — I particularly appreciated this part of the post:
As God is my witness, I was trying to be nice about Obama for America / Organizing For America / Organizing For Action / Oafs [Flatulating] Around / whatever else it is that they’re calling themselves these days – anyway, I was trying to be nice about the fact that the latest iteration of the group was having trouble getting itself up and running, or even upright.
It is odd that the much lauded tech geniuses working with the Obama administration couldn’t manage to purchase the domain name in advance. Pretty much anyone who works on site development knows this is a first step — possibly even before naming your group. It’s all about branding you see. But I suppose that’s less of a consideration when you’re trying to keep the consistency (confusion) of having 10 different groups with the same acronym.
So, mistakes happen and we reserve the right to have a chuckle because we can relate (see press release disclosure above). However, one wonders if mistakes of this kind may be less the result of simple human error and more the result of general policy in matters of tech. We’ve little doubt that the new OFA will not see the same problems when it comes to raising money.
