You’ll recall that Ethan S. Winner of Winner & Associates has admitted to creating and producing a Sarah Palin smear video with the goal of making its success appear as if it was generating grassroot support. Winner & Associates is a firm with long ties to Democrats, from representing Valerie Plame to its employees donating to campaigns. Well, as it turns out, the firm has a history with Obama chief strategist David Axelrod. Axelrod, incidentally, is known as the King of Astroturfing — the process of artificially generating grassroot support for a cause.

In 1996, a group of investors penned Proposal E in Detroit which allowed for casinos. The investors hired the firm Winner/Wagner & Mandabach to study the chances of passing that proposal. As told in an article written by Laurence B. Deitch, an attorney for the proposal supporters, the Winner firm later led the media effort to help pass the measure. It brought in several outside media and communications groups.

A video from the Detroit Mayor’s office produced by Mayor Archer’s political consultant David Axelrod was noted as a key part of the Winner directed effort. This revelation places Axelrod in a direct working relationship with the Chuck Winner PR firm in a past campaign.

Axelrod is considered by many to be a master of planting campaign messages on the internet to look like they did not originate from an organized campaign, a practice know as “astroturfing” (because of the fake grass-roots nature of the message). The joint effort on the Prop E campaign is the first public indication of a direct tie between the Obama campaign team and the Winner PR firm.

Winner thoroughly denies that he worked with Team Obama on the recent video. He simply wrote the script, created the graphics, edited the video, hired a professional voiceover artist, created false accounts, and promoted it himself, you see.