BY KEITH ROLLMAN – The AtomicMonkey.WordPress site was my personal blog. It was not, as stated by Neil Abercrombie’s recent press release, a Mufi Hannemann campaign strategy.
Several weeks ago the PR agency for Mufi Hannemann expressed their concern that others might try to associate it with the Mayor so I took it down (over two weeks ago).
As far as I know Mayor Hannemann never even saw it and certainly didn’t have anything to do with it. Assertions to the contrary by Abercrombie are simply speculation.
Blogging is today’s choice for the expression of first amendment rights. I have been writing commentary and drawing political cartoons for some time (about 40 years).
One cartoon depicting the demise of Neil Abercrombie’s pony tail, and comparing it to a gecko snapping off it’s tail to get away, ran in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1997.
I have known and disliked Neil Abercrombie since before Mayor Hannemann was out of High School.
Now I face the problem of having to defend my work, now that it is no longer available for people to judge it for themselves.
I must rebut what Neil Abercrombie says it was rather than what it really was.
Why didn’t Neil Abercrombie complain while it was up and running?
Atomic Monkey was parody, plain and simple. You might not like my style of humor, but blogs are not intrusive media…you have to seek them out.
I remember Neil Abercrombie when he HAD a sense of humor and dressed up as superman to run for the U.S. Senate…in fact it was in AtomicMonkey.
Almost everyone BUT Neil Abercrombie thought AtomicMonkey was pretty funny.
It was certainly tame and tasteful by today’s internet standards…no obscenity or profanity, and contained a invitation to correct anything that was factually in error.
Abercrombie never accepted that invitation or disputed a single fact for over three months, chosing only now to complain and try to exploit this as an issue.
Why not talk about his offshore drilling votes or same-sex marriage instead?
We all know the answer to that. It isn’t Neil’s thin-skined and oportunistic response that bothers me the most, it’s the reactionary mob mentality that he is trying to incite in this loyal followers about this horrible idea of a average citizen using his first ammendment rights to express his opinions.
One person, who obviously is operating without any facts, recently sent me an email accusing me of spreading “vicious rumors.”
Really, posting commentary on a political candidates public record is “spreading vicious rumors?”
Making fun of politicans is a time honored American tradition that’s been around as long as we have, and so far the U.S. Supreme Court has defended us from the Neil Abercrombie’s of the world, and our constitution right to depict them as we really see them.
Aloha Keith,
I for one am very sorry that you were forced to take down your web site and wish that those who convinced you to do so would instead respect your 1st Amendment rights.
Clearly you’re a guy that knows what he’s doing and for someone who was a reasonably well-paid campaign consultant (one of these days you’ve got to tell me how you got paid $75k for the 2004 campaign…I need to raise my rates!) you must have had a pretty good idea of the responses your content would create. From what I can recall, the site’s voice almost seemed to purposely elicit a dramatic response from the reader. You purposely wanted a strong response.
I must say I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that Mufi didn’t have any knowledge of this site. If that’s true, then it raises far more questions than it answers.
How could he (Mufi) not know? You work with him on an “almost daily” basis.
Is he that isolated from the activities of his key people?
Why would you never share it with him? This isn’t a hobby blog about your pet rock collection (assuming you have a pet rock collection blog). It’s about the Governor’s race. Serious business.
Did you purposely keep this from him so that if something like this went down he could claim ignorance?
How did the PR agency (is that McNeil-Wilson?) find out about it in the first place?
Who else knew that you were the site’s curator?
Why didn’t they share it with Mufi?
Keith, gotta tell you, it would take a whole lot of “belief suspension” to accept the fact that the campaign team and Mufi didn’t know about this site. This is one of the smartest, sharpest teams in town. They pulled off the biggest PR victory in history in 2008. They don’t leave any stones unturned. Gordon Bruce ain’t no fool. Neither are you. Can’t have a sharp team on one side and complete and total incompetence on the other. It doesn’t add up.
But be that as it may…
The real discussion I’d like to have is why take the site down? Clearly, you created it as a strategy to help your boss’ campaign. And clearly, it’s now being taken down because it’s being seen as hurting your boss’ campaign.
My burning question is this: what changed? What changed from what was previously thought to be a good idea and suddenly is a bad idea? So bad, in fact, that you don’t merely stop publishing new content, but you take down the whole thing?
What was the trigger? It wasn’t like the whole site was nicey nicey and then you wrote one blog post that went off the deep end. The whole blog was over the top. It had that Eric Ryan feel to it, heavy photoshopping and all. In fact, if the site was dissing Republicans, I would have guessed it was an Eric Ryan creation.
Somehow, something must have come back to Mufi’s campaign team that there was going to be some serious negative PR and unless this site was taken down pronto there was going to be a whole lotta hurt going on. That is purely a guess on my part. I have no evidence other than what I’ve stated here.
Come on Keith, we want the real story. Don’t stop now baby! Since you’re not on the campaign team anyway, lets hear it!
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Keith Rollman (a.k.a. Bob Wiesel) has conveniently left out the fact that he is a high-level Hannemann political appointee who’s salary is paid by Honolulu taxpayers. Even if you grant that Keith Rollman was on “unpaid leave” while he was promoting Atomic Monkey, at a minimum Mufi Hannemann is allowing city employees to blur the lines between political dirty work and the people’s work. Nobody—conservative, liberal, or moderate—likes it when taxpayer resources are wasted on political games.
It’s a classic Mufi dirty-tricks campaign and the people are catching on. When they find out who Keith Rollman is, no one will believe that he is some inconsequential “campaign volunteer”. Keith Rollman used to work for that PR agency that “expressed their concern” to him. No one will believe his statements that the campaign and the Mayor knew nothing about Atomic Monkey, especially since the campaign chairman himself was one of the first supporters of Atomic Monkey back in March. When the “official” campaign rehashes all the material that was on Atomic Monkey on it’s new “tamer” negative website, the people will figure out that it’s all the same bunch of people. They can’t spin their way out of this one.
Peter, sorry no inside scoop to be had. It was exactly as I wrote it up. No, triggering event, just some valid concern that people would assume it was official campaign messaging when it wasn’t.
If it makes you feel any better most of the money paid to me went to production vendors.
The material in Atomic Monkey was based on substantiated facts (that Abercrombie has yet to challenge), and the tone of the humor was no different than the average political cartoon.
Ed, there is no blurring of any lines. When we are on city time we do city business, when we are not we can do anything that any other private citizen is entitled to do.
If I was an Abercrombie supporter I would be using my time to figure out how to respond to the valid criticism raised by Atomic Monkey concerning Neil’s long and very public stint in the U.S. Congress. Atomic Monkey is gone but Neil’s record still remains for all to see.
Another point to keep in mind…I took this site down over three weeks ago…not as a reaction to anything Neil said. Neil only started complaining after he knew it was already down, clearly as a distraction to the revelation about his promotion of offshore drilling and simultaneous blossoming of his oil contributors.
Since Peter and Ed are such sticklers for complete disclosure it should be noted that Peter Kay is Webmaster for Panos Prevedouros and Ed Morita is one of the administrators of Neil Abercrombie’s Flicker site.
Whoa, Encyclopedia Brown, you just totally outed Abercrombie’s Flickr administrator! He may never recover from the indignity.
Hey! I’m borderline offended!
I’m Panos’ honorary campaign chair and spokesman (fixoahu.com). I also was Online Community Organizer (volunteer) for Djou’s campaign, online manager for Ann Kobayashi’s 2008 Mayoral Race, produced the launch video for Ed Case’s congressional race (before I joined the GOP), curator for political Web site HawaiiConCon.org, and volunteer Chief Strategist for the Hawaii Republican Party. Get your disclosures right! 🙂
Nice job at ducking my questions. But of course you’re under no obligation to answer. Neither is Neil.
And come on, it’s PR 101 on why Neil didn’t acknowledge your site: for the same reason Mufi never acknowledged the various hate sites against him: addressing those sites bring more attention to them which is the last thing they need.
Note by all of my disclosures above, I’m not working (or volunteering) for anyone running against Mufi. That of course might change after the primaries but for today, I’m genuinely interested in the burning question I posed earlier.
Sorry Peter, I didn’t mean to misrepresent your contributions. As far as your burning question goes, I did answer it, but you didn’t like the answer. Before you lock into any candidate after the primary take a close look at the state IT plan that Hannemann will be unveiling, I think it’s something you could support.
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