“As we enter the final days of this punk’s campaign, he’s so desperate for support he’s been reduced to the Al Sharpton technique: Renting a crowd to make it appear as if you’ve actually got support,” JWF writes, linking to this New York Post report:
Anthony Weiner is having such a hard time generating support for his limp campaign that he has resorted to paying a rent-a-crowd firm to provide “supporters” for his events, The Post has learned.
Some of the gung-ho Weiner crowds, including at the Aug. 11 Dominican Day Parade in Manhattan, were really actors who were paid $15 an hour by the California firm Crowds on Demand, according to a source with direct knowledge of the deal.
The source said surrogates for Weiner approached the Santa Monica-based company days after Indiana-native Sydney Leathers came forward to say that Weiner had continued his digital dalliances after resigning from Congress.
The campaign asked the company to have actors seem “like either supporters or people who met him and became supporters as a result of that encounter,” the source said.
“The people would initially be skeptical and then they ask him various questions but would appear then to be convinced by his spiel,” according to the source, who said the campaign used Crowds on Demand “several times.”
I’m kind of surprised Weiner didn’t go the King’s Speech route, and hire an inflatable crowd to appear behind him during campaign appearances, which seems like the perfect metaphorical combination of onstage and backstage proclivities. Plus a huge symbolic safe sex message, to boot!
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