I don’t like Phil de Vellis.

You may not recognize his name, but you know his work — the YouTube hit of Hillary Clinton’s talking head in Apple’s 1984 commercial. He meant to show support for Barack Obama, whose campaign has been taking heat from day one over the video, insisting no one connected to them had anything to do with the video. But de Vellis was connected, distantly, as an employee of an Internet strategy firm hired by Obama. Now DeVellis has written a letter for The Huffington Post outing himself. He claims he politely resigned; we all know he was fired.

His confession has an arrogant, self-congratulatory tone: “I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the [political] process…This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed.” De Vellis seems to think he’s doing something new or telling us something we don’t know. Instead, he appears to be jumping up and down in the crowd yelling, “Look at me, I’m special too — I’m the next Kos!”

I found one aspect of the video especially hypocritical. De Vellis chose the Orwellian scenes to protest Clinton’s establishment position — power to the people! Think for yourself! But on the commercial rebel’s waist sits an iPod. I supposed De Vellis hasn’t heard of iPod city — the giant sweatshop in China where workers assemble millions of tiny, DRM’d, 10,000-song holding little symbols of corporate control. It doesn’t get more establishment than that.

Hopefully de Vellis will fade back into obscurity and cubicle life at another company. But I fear that, like Judy Miller and Jessica Cutler, he will be rewarded for his cry for attention. There may be a book deal or a political job, and he will probably make more “citizen ads.” Pretty soon he’ll be just another talking head.

Jennifer Leblanc