Attack of the Obamabots

The Obamabots are the ragtag digital cavalry riding to the president’s rescue, a cadre of decidedly amateur supporters, people far outside the Beltway and its norms, whose intense loyalty and passion at a moment of wide disaffection can be reminiscent of Sarah Palin’s core of backers.

The best known of the group is a blogger who goes by the handle @shoq and who has proved adept at getting into the conversations and under the skins of his pusillanimous liberal foes. With a respectable 12,000 Twitter followers and an astronomical 173,000 tweets since 2007, Shoq — who spoke to POLITICO but declined to give his name — has carved out a modest but real corner of the diverse new media space…

Some prominent liberals declined to talk to POLITICO about the Obamabots for fear of drawing their wrath. Greenwald, an early Obama dissenter because of the president’s refusal to investigate the Bush administration for war crimes, sees them as a symptom of a broader disease, a “cult of personality” some critics say surrounds Obama.

“They don’t have any belief system, they don’t have any political views, they only have reverence for and loyalty to President Obama,” he said.