Philip de Vellis

Do you know this man?

A mystery is solved.

The person responsible for creating the "Vote Different" anti-Hillary Clinton ad has been identified.

The ad didn't come from a member of the vast Right-Wing conspiracy. It was the product of Philip de Vellis, a self-described "proud Democrat" and a man with connections to Barack Obama's campaign.

WASHINGTON -- The anonymous creator of the video comparing a future with Hillary Clinton as president to the world in George Orwell's '1984' is an ex-employee of a digital consulting firm with ties to rival candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, acknowledged that he was the creator of the video, which portrayed Clinton as a Big Brother figure and urged support for Obama's presidential campaign.

De Vellis said he resigned from the firm on Wednesday after he learned that he was about to be unmasked by liberal pundit Arianna Huffington on her Web site, HuffingtonPost.com.

He later posted his own lengthy admission and explanation on the Huffington site.

Is that how The Huffington Post operates?

First, blackmail someone; and then offer the individual space to fess up and explain via an exclusive blog entry found only on The Huffington Post.

De Vellis, AKA ParkRidge47, tells all.

He writes:

Hi. I'm Phil. I did it. And I'm proud of it.

I guess this wasn't blackmail.

De Vellis seems eager to have his fifteen minutes of fame and be embraced by the fringe Left.

I made the "Vote Different" ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it--by people of all political persuasions--will follow.

This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.

The campaigns had no idea who made it--not the Obama campaign, not the Clinton campaign, nor any other campaign. I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs.

The specific point of the ad was that Obama represents a new kind of politics, and that Senator Clinton's "conversation" is disingenuous. And the underlying point was that the old political machine no longer holds all the power.

I think de Vellis is giving himself way too much credit.

He put out an anti-Hillary ad on YouTube. So what?

I don't think that indicates that he holds the future of American politics in his hands.

Certainly, the Internet provides a forum for "ordinary citizens" to express themselves. It amplifies the voices of the masses, something that wasn't possible before the Internet era.

Still, I wouldn't say that de Vellis' ad had any significant impact on the 2008 campaign.

The reason the ad drew so much attention was all the speculation about its source.

Now we know.

De Vellis wants Obama to be president. Watching the ad, that was no mystery.

De Vellis continues:

I've resigned from my employer, Blue State Digital, an internet company that provides technology to several presidential campaigns, including Richardson's, Vilsack's, and -- full disclosure -- Obama's. The company had no idea that I'd created the ad, and neither did any of our clients. But I've decided to resign anyway so as not to harm them, even by implication.

This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed.

Another one of those "I've decided to resign" situations.

It's sort of like Richard Nixon "decided to resign."

I'm sure de Vellis received a lot of encouragement from his employer to leave the company.

And Obama wants to look clean. He can't be seen as condoning an anti-Hillary ad this early in the game.

We've seen that blogs and Internet postings can be extremely influential. I don't mean to underestimate their impact.

But in the case of de Vellis and his ad, I think he's overestimating his importance.

It was just a YouTube ad.

It's not like it ran during the Super Bowl.

Get a grip.

I don't know which is more dangerous -- underestimating someone else's power or overestimating your own?