A group of Obama supporters has crowdsourced the Fight the Smears campaign with a new website, Smearbusters.org. Using search engine results, the site compiles a list of smears ("Guilt-by-association with Ayers" is one, with 180 hits) and then brokers the smears to a team of volunteers. The idea is that the volunteer will go to the forum, blog comment thread, etc. and join in the discussion, providing counterbalance to the smear.

The mechanics of the site are fairly simple. A user is provided a link to a smear, and fact-based copy to address the allegation. A response to the Ayres smear includes:

William Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with whom Barack served on the board of an education-reform organization in the mid-1990's. According to the Associated Press, they are not close: "No evidence shows they were "pals" or even close when they worked on community boards years ago ..." (http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D93KD6Q00&show_article=1)

Smear groups and now the McCain campaign are trying to connect Obama to acts Ayers committed 40 years ago - when Barack was just eight years old. Here's what the New York Times reported on the connection (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html)

This effort is interesting on a number of fronts. While I'm fairly certain that such efforts won't win over bitter partisans, this site may play a role in a larger informational context. When people are searching for information on a candidate (or sent a link about a candidate), the presence of counterbalanced information may tone down the partisan rancor of a page. In a sense, this Smearbusters.org is taking the fight to Google, extending the pre-existing informational strategies of the campaign.

It should be noted that Smearbusters.org will need to proceed judiciously to avoid claims of astroturfing. For this reason, I think it is unlikely that we'd see a candidate-supported version of the site. Even so, it is not hard to imagine volunteer efforts like these popping up on both sides of the fence in future campaigns.