SWGA Politics

[UPDATED] Governor Candidate Pulls Classic Bait and Switch SCAM

and he can’t even claim to be the first to do it this cycle.

For those who missed it, earlier today John Oxendine announced his latest campaign ploy – since all the others so far have gone over like lead balloons – in the form of an online petition to ’stop Obamacare’.

The problem is, it really is a blatant attempt to do nothing more than build his campaign database, as evidenced by the second screenshot below. The first is the front page of this ‘petition’.

Note that when he was called out on the blatancy of this scam, he pulled down the second page and added a few fields to the first page – name, county, and state. In other words, it now looks extremely similar to a fairly standard form to sign up for a campaign email list. The difference being that this one asks for county and state, while most campaign email lists ask for zipcodes. Both are ways to narrow you down to a particular geography though.

Like I said when Karen Handel did this,

More troubling to me is that this whole ‘petition’ is simply a way to get your information in her database, even if you otherwise wouldn’t want to be in said database. Now, according to my good friend Jason Pye, who worked on the Bob Barr Presidential campaign last year, this is something that all campaigns do, and even Bob’s campaign did it. I told him publicly and I stand by it now that just because a Libertarian does it does not make it right.

If Karen Handel wants you to sign up for her email list, fine! That in and of itself is not a big deal to me at all, and indeed, I’m trying to make sure I sign up for ALL the campaign email lists at the Statewide level and any at the General Assembly/local levels that I hear about as well!

All I’m saying is that a) the wording of the petition needs to be available so that you can make sure you agree with what it actually says and b) that campaigns need to be explicit that you are actually signing up for their campaign email list at the same time you are signing the petition, and there needs to be some mechanism so that you can do one or the other or both, whatever your actual desire may be.

Just please, be aware this is happening and make sure you know what you’re doing online.

What makes OX’s attempt at this even worse than Handel’s is that at least Handel kept it on her own site, so you had some clue that it was going on. Ox has created the appearance of a completely separate site, even though data from both apparently goes into the same mailing list database.

So hey, if you want to get Ox’s email updates, feel free to sign up at either johnoxendine.com or youcanstopobama.com.

Just remember that he has no problems pulling millenia-old scams and expecting people to not see right through it.

Ox's youcanstopobama.com main page

What happens when you hit submit on youcanstopobama.com as of 1:30p Aug 5 2009

[UPDATE] Something else that makes OX’s campaign ploy petition even worse than I had originally thought has been brought to my attention: Even though this is clearly a campaign-related site, there is no political legalese, such as ‘Paid for by Ox 2010′ or some such, anywhere on this site. This was first pointed out around 8:30pm last night on twitter and again at 10:25pm last night in a comment on PeachPundit, and as of 5:15am this morning had not been corrected. I will post later today with an update on this issue.

Futhermore, his own website, johnoxendine.com, has this same issue. For full disclosure, Ray McBerry and Austin Scott’s sites do not have a ‘Pad for by X’ statement, but they DO have a copyright notation from the campaign – which neither of Ox’s sites have.