Right-Wing Front Group Rolls Out Smear Movie on Obama

By Bill Berkowitz, Media Transparency. Posted August 15, 2008.

It won't be a post-Labor Day blockbuster or win critical acclaim, but Bossie's Citizens United is rolling out 'Hype: The Obama Effect,' an anti-Obama documentary that aims to make waves.

Regnery has published a major anti-Obama book -- David Freddoso's "The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate" -- and 2004 Swiftboater Jerome Corsi has written his -- "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality." All sorts of folks are peddling anti-Obama t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and more. Now it's David Bossie's turn for a big politico/merchandizing play.

Although still a relatively young man, Bossie, the president of Citizens United, has been a political mudslinger for a nearly two decades. He gained some national notoriety in the 1990s when he was relentless in his pursuit of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and later that decade was fired from his position as an investigator for a House committee. Earlier this year, Bossie "took out classified newspaper ads in Columbia University's newspaper and the Chicago Tribune ... searching for [Obama's] ... term paper," supposedly a thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament, Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer, reported in late July. Although he could find it, he wrote in an e-mail to NBC News that "A thesis entitled Nuclear Disarmament, written at the height of The Cold War in 1983, might shed some light upon what Barack Obama thought about our most pressing foreign policy issue for 40-plus years (U.S.-Soviet Relations)."

Bossie's biggest play this election season is the production of an anti-Obama film: On the eve of the Democratic Party convention in Denver, Citizens United Productions will premiere its full-length documentary, "Hype: The Obama Effect." The film is unlikely to be a blockbuster, it thus far hasn't generated the buzz Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911" did before its release, and will surely not be hitting the festival circuit. In fact, thus far, there are no movie houses listed under the "Theater" section of the hypemovie.com website, scheduled to show the film.

However, according to Politico, Bossie, who co-produced the film, which was directed and written by Alan Peterson -- who also directed "Fahrenhype 9/11," a response to Moore's award-winning documentary -- "hopes the documentary will land in about a dozen theaters, but [recognizes that its] primary distribution will come via mail-order sales, with DVDs selling for approximately $25." Bossie pointed out that the film will be available for rental at Netflix and Blockbuster, and sold at Barnes & Noble, Borders and on Amazon.com, with possible downloads available online at iTunes and other sites.

Alan Peterson, according to Reidblog (The Reid Report Blog), is "a sometime actor/director/producer. ... IMDB Pro lists just three credits for him: an acting turn in the 2007 [film] ‘The Haunting of Marsten Manor,' ... ‘Fahrenhype 9/11' ... [which] was released straight to DVD ... and 1999's memorable ‘Fortune Cookie,' if you remember movies you've neither heard of nor seen."

Ever since Senator Hillary Clinton was defeated in the Democratic Party primaries by Senator Barack Obama -- thereby making Citizens United's film "Hillary: The Movie," which took 18 months and millions of dollars to produce, politically useless -- the organization has been concentrating on readying the Obama documentary for distribution. Bossie is also the author of the "Hillary: The Politics of Personal Destruction," a book released in early March of this year.

In late July, Citizens United (website), announced the launching of its "Hype: The Obama Effect" website (website). Ten days later, Bossie claimed that the site had received 250,000 hits since its launch.

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Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering right-wing groups and movements.

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