The Hillary Clinton campaign’s first major interactive website program has attracted little participation outside of a small group including past and present Clinton campaign staffers and volunteers.
Hillaryclinton.com recently invited supporters to add their own annotations to Clinton’s Roosevelt Island campaign kickoff speech, to allow people to share what specific Clinton sentences and paragraphs meant to them. The program is a collaboration with the Brooklyn-based tech company Genius.com, which uses the slogan “Annotate the world.”
“Have a favorite line, an issue that’s close to your heart, or a story that stayed with you after the speech? Let everyone know by following these instructions,” the campaign stated, instructing people to “Highlight” a piece of text and then a click an “H” button to annotate.
The site’s 126 annotations come from only 43 different accounts, many of them completely anonymous, after one week of mild annotating.
WATCH:
Bespectacled Microsoft program manager Casey Penk, who said he attended the Roosevelt Island speech and was “electrified” by it, led the way with 30 annotations, followed down the stretch by 2014 high school graduate Nadia Perl with seven.
A Daily Caller analysis of the other annotators reveals a lot of Clinton operatives on the site.
The Clinton campaign’s “Hillary For America” account posted nine annotations, shilling Clinton campaign merchandise including Hillary pantsuit T-shirts.
Clinton’s 2008 campaign press aide Audrey Gelman, now a vice president at the Democratic consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker, posted four annotations — giving background info on Clinton’s Senate career and writing, “The last president to balance the budget was….Bill Clinton.”
Progressive consultant Tom Watson, a Clinton Global Initiative speaker and co-founder of the #HillaryMen movement supporting Clinton’s campaign, weighed in by sharing an op-ed about his manly pro-Hillary efforts.
Raymond Penko posted three annotations, at one point urging fellow annotators to “Repeat the campaign theme: ‘Moving forward.'” It turns out Penko was a caucus precinct campaigner on Hillary’s 2008 campaign, a phone-banker for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and did data assessment for the “HRC Super Volunteers,” a group aiding the Clinton campaign. (RELATED: Here Are The Words Hillary Volunteers Won’t Let You Say).
Adam Smith, communications director for the Washington-based left-wing campaign reform group Public Campaign, weighed in with two annotations. Smith responded to a Clinton talking point about a “basic bargain” by saying, “I just really like this line.” When Clinton said government reform would be one of her four fights, Smith replied, “I love that this is one of the four fights.”
Dan Berger, who weighed in with a pair of annotations, runs a high-tech hospitality company that counts the U.S. State Department as a customer. Berger also used to work for a certain congressman.
“After graduating from New York City’s Hunter College in 2004, he became a Special Assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives where he was described as ‘bright, energetic and hard-working’ by the Congressman he served,” according to Berger’s bio.
That congressman, he failed to mention, was named Anthony Weiner — serial sexter and husband of Hillary Clinton’s right-hand aide Huma Abedin.
Then there were some journalists.
An annotator named Laura Tillman who wrote “Love how she’s embracing the historic nature of her campaign :)” has been identified by TheDC as a reporter who has written for The Nation. PopMatters contributing writer Brian Duricy also weighed in with multiple annotations.
With few people annotating, company executives and staffers affiliated with Genius had to jump in repeatedly to offer their own annotations on passages of the speech.