Like any of the 796 superdelegates in this highly-charged presidential election cycle, Tom Ryan says he's taking his responsibility of choosing a Democratic nominee for president very seriously.

Meet Tom Ryan, the fake superdelegate.

Image courtesy of Howard ThomasSo seriously that the putative candidate for mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, has posted several YouTube videos describing what it's like to be a superdelegate.

"Many of you don't know what it's like to be in my shoes," Ryan agonized in an April 17 video shot at what looks like his kitchen table. "If Hillary wins Pennsylvania, do I go with the will of the people of the state and support Hillary? Or do I go with the will of the people of the nation and support Obama? This is why I'm undecided."

Ryan asked his viewers to help him to make the decision, and thousands responded, while the site's address was passed from one political website to the next.

There was only one problem: Tom Ryan doesn't exist. He's a character played by actor Ron Rogell who was hired in January 2007 to star in an online sitcom called The Party.

The tremendous response that the fake superdelegate character received illustrates how quickly grassroots supporters in this heated political climate can pick up and transmit information regardless of its accuracy, in what has up until recently been a closely-fought race where every delegate counts.

"We assumed that people online and in the blog communities would watch the videos and realize that we were doing thinly-veiled satire, but that's not what happened," says Howard Thomas, a 27-year-old Democratic political consultant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the show's creator and executive producer.

In order to win the party's nomination for president, the Democratic candidates must win 2,025 delegates. There are 796 superdelegates, none of whom have to declare their support for a candidate until the

Democratic National Convention in August. Nor are they obligated to support any candidate in line with any constituency, unlike the pledged delegates who are.

Though he has since pulled ahead, and the Democratic race is largely seen as over, Barack Obama was still behind in the superdelegate count at the time Thomas released the video on YouTube. The official comment sections on Clinton's and Obama's campaign sites are littered with messages urging peers to support their candidate in a web poll featured on the fake Tom Ryan's site. Server logs that Thomas showed Threat Level show that traffic came in droves through other online political forums supporting Clinton, and from the leading liberal weblog DailyKos, and from

Facebook messages. By the end of the week, Ryan's site recorded more than 20,000 hits.

The Vote Tom Ryan site is a trial balloon for a project that Thomas launched early in 2007.

"I'm primarily a writer, and I just wanted to see how far we could take this idea, and it turns out that we could take it pretty far,"

says Thomas.

"Whereas West Wing (and all other political shows) are national and idealistic, I'd wanted to do a show that was local and corrupt," he explains, saying that he wants to tell a story that focuses on the grittier aspects of politics. "There's never been a really gritty, edgy show about local politics in the vein of the Sopranos or Rescue Me."

Thomas says that he's hired 15 actors and he has two directors. The plan is to release another superdelegate-related video sometime next week, and then to start releasing the first of a full 13 episodes starting just before the Democratic National Convention in August.

"It has to be said – this project is not a hit job on the Democrats,"

Thomas says. "The Democrats in the story are just the lesser of two evils."

Thomas says that he wants to make the point because his career up until now has been in politics. He worked for then presidential candidate

Howard Dean in 2004 as a field organizer in New Hampshire, and for senator John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 in Pennsylvania.

And he says that he hasn't had any complaints from the DNC, or the Clinton or Obama campaigns.

"I think they realize that we weren't trying to destroy the election,"

he says. "If this project doesn't work out,

I'm going to need to be employed somewhere – there was no harm intended."

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