« Self-Reliance: The Heart Of 'Americanism' | Main | Exposing Washington's Best-Kept 'Secret Hold' »

A Candidate's Quest For Absolution By Blog

The greatest failing of candidate blogs is that they are not personal enough. Most politicians are too guarded -- too political -- to truly adopt the spirit of candidness and transparency that makes the blogosphere special.

The Phoenix nailed the mindset of most politicians who blog in a piece that dubbed them "ploggers." They shamelessly and ineffectively use their blogs to make plugs rather than engage voters and constituents. "[A] blog is supposed to be personal, especially when it comes to whacking around your ideological or electoral opponents," the paper said.

Some politicians are starting to get it, though, and Republican Mike McGavick, a Senate candidate in Washington state, is among them. He scored some points in the transparency department this week by posting a puportedly tell-all blog entry that details his failures in life -- a marriage that ended in divorce, his subsequent role as "part-time dad," his arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol, his role in running an attack political advertisement, and his difficult decision to lay off employees at the Safeco insurance company.

"My pledge to you is one of authenticity, civility and transparency," McGavick rote. "I take responsibility for my actions and my decisions, but it's up to you to decide if what I offer outweighs my shortcomings."

Some skeptics questioned the genuiness of the open letter to voters. One commenter, for instance, scolded McGavick for including at the top of the letter a gripe about current character attacks against him. Allan Batchelder said that "disingenuous" paragraph suggests that McGavick still doesn't "get the point. You defend yourself by attacking your opponents? Isn't that what you've just accused them of doing?"

From The Roots, the blog of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, predictably made a similar argument by criticizing a television ad McGavick currently is running against Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell. And McGavick's campaign just as predictably defended the ad.

But others both appreciated McGavick's honesty about his mistakes and praised as an astute political move his decision to air them himself on the campaign blog.

"McGavick's open letter was undoubtedly as edited and re-edited and politically calculated as any other campaign communication," said Mary Katharine Ham of the Republican forum Townhall.com, "but this is a different kind of message. It really does come across sincere and refreshingly Washington-outsider. If McGavick's campaign is aiming to tap into some of that anti-incumbent sentiment, I say he did a good job of setting himself apart. I think it will probably play well."

Real Clear Politics was both critical and laudatory of the blog entry. "McGavick ruined the confessional mood by declaring that the disclosure wasn't a 'campaign tactic.' It clearly was a tactic -- and probably a very smart one at that."

But RCP added this dead-on warning: "The only way this can hurt McGavick is if there is something else in his background that turns up between now and November 7. Then, having gone out of his way to confess to voters 'the worst and most embarrassing moments' of his life, McGavick would look doubly bad -- and he would pay for it dearly at the polls."

Seattle Times political reporter David Postman, on the other hand, proved that most journalists just can't help but be cynical. At his own blog, Postman suggested that McGavick chose to make his confession by blog rather than to the press because he wanted a "softer opening" to the story and that he downplayed the only "unreported" news -- the DUI arrest -- by putting it second in the list of mistakes.

"McGavick has chosen an unusual strategy in trying to protect himself from negative stories and attack ads," Postman said. "I hadn't heard anything about his DUI before, but the rest of McGavick's list are not secrets and he certainly has gotten questions on all of them before. He clearly is making a preemptive move

Posted by Danny | 07:27 AM

Comments

Post a Comment