Because many of the comments on our original post continue to suggest that this video was produced by Republicans or opposing Democratic campaigns, I feel the need to clarify further that the folks behind the video are in no way secret about their names, affiliations nor intentions. They are amateur filmmakers, sketch and comedy folks who like Obama and thought they could help his campaign and get some attention themselves.

I still think the video was in bad taste, and it makes me very uneasy, but this was not, as far as publicly-available information can tell, an intentional smear campaign. I’m going to paste the majority of this ABC story and am bolding some of the key lines.

As much as the news may break the hearts of thousands of Democratic men, Obamagirl, in reality, is not the pulchritudinous callipygian who riffs on policy with Akon-esque beats, singing “you’re into border security/let’s break this border between you and me/universal health care reform/it makes me warm.”

Rather, she is a fictitious creation.

The song was performed by Leah Kauffman, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Temple University in Philadelphia, who wrote the lyrics with a friend, 32-year-old advertising executive Ben Relles, and the music with her producer, Rick Friedrich.

An actress/model named Amber Lee Ettinger then lip-synched the song for the video, shot by filmmakers found on Craigslist two hours before Relles and Ettinger hit New York City one Friday in May to shoot the video on a DV camera.

“Not including the hours we spent working on it, it probably cost a couple thousand dollars,” said Relles, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business, who said he did it for fun, not money, but is also selling “Obamagirl” and “I Got a Crush on Obama” T-shirts.

Relles said the idea for “I Got a Crush on Obama” came after he and Kauffman received some media notice for a previous collaboration that was a female take on a recent “Saturday Night Live” spoof of boy bands. Both fans of Obama, the two thought it would be amusing to capture, in song, their affection for the candidate at the same time the Clinton camp is holding a campaign song contest on her campaign Web site.

“We were just trying to come up with something funny,” said Kauffman, a journalism major, who said the music was influenced by the best of Top 40. “As long as there’s a venue for it, we’ll probably keep doing it.”

Also making waves this year is a video clip of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., briefly singing “Bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann,” which garnered more than 850,000 hits. In 2006, a flip remark by then-Sen. George Allen, a Virginia Republican, in which he called an Indian-American Democratic campaign operative a “macaca,” posted to the Internet and helped end a once-promising political career.

Relles said his team had no contact at all with the Obama campaign.

“We hope it helps him, though,” he adds.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

I hope this helps clarify the situation.

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