Lieberman’s Ideals Spawn Several Websites
By Bill Yelenak
If Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) has trouble raising money during the campaign season, he could a start a website to sell “Lieberman for President” yarmulkes to make a few extra bucks.
Jason Erkes, creator of joebeanie.com, has shown that it works.
Erkes said he was attending a rally in 2000 at which Lieberman, then the Democratic vice presidential nominee, was speaking during Al Gore’s presidential campaign, and when he saw people holding signs and wearing yarmulkes, he said the idea came to him to combine the two.
According to Erkes, he had sold lots of the skullcaps when Lieberman was running with Gore, and now, with Lieberman getting ready to run for president, “I got the printing presses going again.”
However, not everyone has as positive a message for the senator as Erkes has. Roger Wehbe, the creator of liebermansucks.com, said Lieberman’s political views about video game laws caused him to create the site, which posts news stories about Lieberman and sells hats, t-shirts and mugs bearing the site’s logo and tagline, “A voting Record that can make a grown man cry.”
Wehbe said his major problem with Lieberman’s record was the Media Marketing Accountability Act, which states that 70 percent of advertisements for mature-rated video games were targeted to children under age 17.
The bill, introduced by Lieberman in 2001 but never approved by Congress, would have made marketing mature games to minors a deceptive and unfair practice and would have allowed the Federal Trade Commission to fine businesses who market such games to minors.
Wehbe said he was disturbed by what he called Lieberman’s “hypocrisy” because, he said, Lieberman “doesn’t want anybody to shoot at each other in video games and he’s such a war hawk he wants to go out and shoot real people.”
Wehbe, a 28-year-old Pennsylvania resident, said he’s a fan of the video game “Counterstrike”, a first-person shooter type game. He said Lieberman’s overall voting record, particularly his introduction of the act in 2001, pushed him over the edge and drove him to create his website.
Wehbe said he was confused as to why Lieberman would ban minors from playing video games, but would send them to war just a few years later.
Wehbe said that the sale of his web items has been picking up but that he’s not planning on making a lot of money from the sales. That’s not why he created the site in the first place, he said.
“It’s not really about the money,” he said. “It’s more of, I want him to at least know that he’s not my mom and he can’t tell me what games I’m allowed to play or not.”
And while liebermansucks.com and joebeanie.com are very different, the two have something in common: neither has heard back from the Lieberman campaign about their websites.
However, Wehbe said he knows that members of the Senate have visited the website and he said many continue to do so. He said he logs the domain names of visitors and that he has had several from senate.gov, the domain used by senators and their staffs when they access pages from Capitol Hill offices. The site also shows it has received hits from house.gov, nasa.gov and even eop.gov, the Executive Office of the President.
“They’re visiting it now on AOL dialups, even though I already have records of them hitting me from the Senate,” Wehbe said, talking about one way Capitol Hill staffs have avoided leaving the senate.gov footprint. “They’re calling it on a daily basis, they’re visiting it. It makes me laugh. I don’t see why they just don’t contact me.”
Erkes said he sent Lieberman’s office a letter with a couple of samples of the yarmulkes the day the website launched, but he has not heard back.
However, Jano Cabrera, a spokesman for Lieberman, said the senator hadn’t received any free samples from Erkes. Cabrera said he had seen joebeanie.com and, in a way, thought it was fitting.
“The guy’s a senator, author and now a presidential candidate,” Cabrera said. “If anyone’s not going to object to people wearing many kind of hats, it’s going to be Joe Lieberman.”
Cabrera said he was unsure whether Lieberman had seen either website.
Although Lieberman may not have visited the website, Erkes said, he didn’t need to take out any advertisements to get others interested in the site.
“We really haven’t done any marketing; it’s been pretty much all word of mouth,” he said.
In fact, the buyer list from joebeanie.com is long and diverse, according to Erkes, who said he has had buyers from “probably 35 of the 50 states and four countries,” including England and Canada.
However, unlike Wehbe, Erkes said his site was not spawned by his political views but is simply “a very unique way for people to show their support for Sen. Lieberman and the cultural significance of his candidacy.”
Bill Yelenak, a Boston University student, works at the Boston University Washington News Service in Washington, D.C. His telephone number is 202-756-2860 ext: 114 and his email is byelenak@newbritainherald.com.
Published in The New Britain Herald, in Connecticut.
