Citizens United, a nonprofit advocacy organization that promotes traditional American values, is blanketing key swing states with hundreds of thousands of copies of a controversial, no-holds-barred film that debunks the quasi-messianic candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama.
The feature-length documentary “Hype: The Obama Effect” is being distributed as a free DVD insert in five newspapers: The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Columbus Dispatch, and the Cincinnati Enquirer in Ohio; the Las Vegas Review Journal in Nevada; and The Palm Beach Post in South Florida.
“Our film ‘Hype’ sets the record straight on just who Barack Obama really is,” Citizens United President David Bossie tells Newsmax. “He’s a radical leftist who is, comparatively speaking, a socialist and someone who is ill-prepared, and indeed unprepared, to lead America in a time of national-security peril when enemies around the world want to destroy the United States.”
The film reviews Obama’s associations with radicals, reveals the details of his political rise in Chicago, and reviews his designation by the National Journal as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate.
“Hype,” first released in September, has drawn sharp criticism from the Obama campaign. Spokesman Isaac Baker dismissed it as another example of “slash-and-burn politics.”
The film presents never-before-seen video of Obama’s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bossie said. It includes interviews with strategist Dick Morris, columnist Robert Novak, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.
It’s no accident the DVD is being distributed in key battleground states, Bossie said.
“Obviously, there are political issues that people say exist,” he says, “but to market a product — and it’s a great product — you have to put it in places where you hope it causes something of a dustup. And it has.”
The DVD provoked angry letters from some newspaper subscribers and hosannas from others.
The liberal Media Matters stated that the DVD “contains numerous falsehoods and misrepresentations of Obama’s record,” then proceeded to attack Bossie personally.
“To be honest,” Bossie told Newsmax, “it is right in the Media Matters way of doing business, which is really unremarkable in their sad, twisted, and demented way of trying to affect people. It doesn’t affect us.”
Bossie said he opted for inserts into newspapers because he knew he couldn’t get his message out effectively via the mainstream media. So far, the strategy appears to be working: Sales of the video spiked this week on his organization’s Web site, CitizensUnited.org, as news of the film spread via word of mouth and the Internet. The free distribution ended Friday.
As for the mainstream media’s treatment of both the film and Obama’s candidacy, Bossie predicts a comeuppance if Obama wins.
“They’re going to be held accountable for what happens,” he predicted, “because people are going to say, ‘What the hell happened? How did we get here?’
“And the answer is, ‘We got here because the American people were made to believe, made to understand, that this man is ready, capable, and prepared to be president — and he is not.”
Bossie added, “He is so far to the left that people are going to be crying foul when it comes to the economic redistribution plans he has for people. People will wake up and their civil liberties will be infringed, if not taken away. And I think the American people will take a look at how this happened and it’s going to be that the mainstream media failed in its job as the Fourth Estate.”