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By Root 841 0

to stop refreshing the same twenty blogs over and over again all day. I kept looking for new little stories, new tea leaves to read. Since so much of what passes for political discourse on the web is the slow meta-dismantling of one’s ideological opponents, it suddenly occurred to me that Americans might value an information site that was designed to fuel this process. I felt a little of that old viral action creeping in. If thousands of Internet users could come together to create Wikipedia, a comprehensive encyclopedia to rival Britannica, then could not they also create an encyclopedia of political smears?

Such was the premise behind OppoDepot.com, “the Internet’s only nonpartisan, collaborative Web 2.0 source for negative information about the 2008 presidential candidates.” The name was a play on the phrase “oppo research”—short for “opposition research,” the inside-Washington term for the classic political black art, the unearthing of salacious details about one’s opponent. Names of political websites have gotten increasingly insidery (e.g., Talking Points Memo, The Politico , ABC News’s The Note), and so I thought “OppoDepot” would be a catchy but properly world-weary title for the site. The idea was that each candidate would have his or her own separate page, cataloging all the decontextualized negative stories that might harm his or her candidacy. Moreover, at the bottom of each profile, a simple form would allow readers to submit any damaging factoids that weren’t already present. As the site’s “About Us” page explained: “We believe that together, we can beat the professionals at their own game, and more quickly get the information that we need to make our important political decisions.”

To start the site, I wrote (with the help of Genevieve, a researcher) a few initial “oppo” items for each candidate. In the writing, we tried to take a neutral tone, except on occasion to couch a story in terms of its political liability. E.g.:

PORN HYPOCRISY

[Sam] Brownback says he wants to crusade against pornography. But a 2005 report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington pointed out that Brownback gets campaign contributions from porn profiteers. . . .

PLAYSTATION3GATE

John Edwards likes to criticize Wal-Mart, but when he wanted a highly sought-after Sony PlayStation3 for his kids, his staff members brazenly tried to pull strings with the giant retailer. . . .

TAX HIKER

Mike Huckabee hopes to run as the right-wing darling in the GOP primaries. But if so, he’ll have run away from his record, which is riddled with tax increases. . . .

Web design was graciously provided, again, by Brian, who gave OppoDepot just the right Web 2.0 sunniness: an airy white look with pastel, bubbly buttons. He also had the idea for “MyOppo,” a service that would beam negative information to readers’ mobile phones, and this turned out to be surprisingly easy to implement.

The site went live in February 2007; slowly the readers, and with them new oppo, began to trickle in. Obama had unpaid parking tickets from his days at Harvard Law School. Giuliani roomed with a gay couple after his separation from his second wife. Tommy Thompson had rumored affairs. Also, even more satisfying, I could tell from my server logs that OppoDepot was becoming a destination for seekers of dirt. I could see the search strings that brought them, streaming in like verse, an ongoing anti-ode to our tarnished political choices:

rudy giuliani cross dressing photos bill richardson women crotch carol shepp car accident opposition research chuck hagel hillary clinton and option trading barack obama rezko swift boat gov. richardson’s obscene gesture joe biden gaffe brownback porn chris dodd scandal barney frank mike huckabee bill richardson—leaking information biden slave state quote

But true contagion proved elusive. Although in its first three weeks OppoDepot attracted roughly 100,000 hits from 5,000 visitors, these all came mostly in a very short spike at the beginning, which was followed immediately thereafter by a precipitous falloff:

FIG. 5-2