Obama denies ties to anti-Clinton Web ad

[Ron Burgundy]

AP - Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) said Friday that his campaign had nothing to do with a Web ad portraying his chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination as an Orwellian figure. Nevertheless, Obama declined to denounce the ad, which depicts New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as Big Brother. He said the ad apparently "captured the public's imagination."

Obama said the ad was produced by a renegade employee of a company hired by his campaign to help design his Web site. The employee, Philip de Vellis, has since left Blue State Digital, a Washington-based consulting firm, and has said he produced the ad on his own time.

The ad, posted on the online video site YouTube and viewed by more than 1 million people, depicts drones watching a Clinton speech in a trance, until a female athlete runs in, shatters the screen and breaks the monotony. It ends with the text: "On January 14th the Democratic primary will begin. And you will see why 2008 isn't going to be like '1984.'" It signs off with "BarackObama.com"

"We had no idea who did it, and that's what we said originally," Obama told The Associated Press in a phone interview from Washington. "It turned out that he worked for a vendor of ours. But he himself said that we had no knowledge that he was doing it."

When asked his opinion of the ad, the Illinois senator declined to denounce it, saying:

"If you scroll down YouTube there are actually probably about a hundred ads of this sort, many of them directed toward me. But I guess this just captured the public's imagination a little more. ..."

"It's not an ad that we would have produced in our campaign."

"We're not going to be able to control every individual who might decide to put something up on the net," Obama added. "At no point was he on my staff, or did we even know who he was."

Obama is scheduled to speak Friday evening at a Culinary Workers Union rally in Las Vegas and take part in a Democratic forum on Saturday.

Obama opposed the Iraq war and spoke out against it while an Illinois state senator in 2003. In the interview, he defended comments he made during the 2004 presidential campaign in which he suggested his anti-war position might have been different if he had access to the same intelligence as members of Congress, including the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq.

"I was specifically asked at the Democratic National Convention whether I faulted our Democratic nominee for president or vice president and obviously those, you know, those quotes should be read in that context," Obama said. "... That in no way contradicts the position that I've taken."

As a state senator in Illinois, Obama voted against gambling expansion and was a critic of accepting political contributions from gambling interests, which Nevada politicians do routinely. In 2003, the senator told the Chicago Defender newspaper he believed "the moral and social cost of gambling, particularly in low-income communities could be devastating."

Obama said Friday that Illinois was different from Nevada, which he said should be proud of how it's used gambling as a "very successful economic model."

Obama said he continued to believe there is "certainly a potential moral and social cost to gambling, if it's not properly regulated, if children have access to it. It's something I continue to be concerned about."

Obama said he was opposed to plans to build a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The senator suggested he might support regional dump sites.

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070324/ap_on_el_pr/obama_ad [link]