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January 13, 2007BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Old Media Versus New On The Romney Team
Hotline On Call reports that Carl Forti has landed at the presidential exploratory committee of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Yes, that's right, the same Mitt Romney who earned endless kudos this week for being so smart about new media has hired as deputy campaign manager and political director the same man (Forti) who has been dismissive of blogs. While working as communications director at the National Republican Congressional Committee, Forti pretty much ignored blogs and made it clear why: "A lot of times, you just don't know how reliable the information on these things is. ... Ninety percent of the time, we know more than they do."
Maybe Forti's attitude has changed since he spoke those words to me a little more than a year ago. Maybe he's a bit more interested in political innovation on the Web than when one of my reporters for Technology Daily interviewed him in the run-up to the 2006 campaign.
As I noted last week, Forti certainly had a chance to see firsthand how much damage those unreliable bloggers can do to a political candidate like his former NRCC boss, Rep. Thomas Reynolds of New York, so maybe he learned a thing or two about the Web the hard way that will benefit Romney.
But if not, there may be some serious clashes between Romney's online team and Forti, who, according to Hotline, will oversee the campaign's politics and field desks.
It wouldn't be the first time that the new kids on the campaign block clashed with the veterans. Democrat Matt Stoller of MyDD apparently had some trying experiences while blogging for the campaign of now-New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine in 2005.
On the other hand, Stoller said it shouldn't deter his fellow bloggers from working for campaigns. "[I]f you're thinking about blogging for a big campaign or organization, you should do it," he wrote in November 2005, months before several bloggers heeded his advice. "It's going to be unpleasant; you will lose most of the internal battles in the campaign, and you're going to be second-fiddle to the traditional communications and press operation.
"But it's worth it because the Internet is now so big that it simply cannot be ignored. And you, my friend, cannot ignore the rest of the political world, and seeing politics from the inside makes this oh so clear."
Posted by Danny | 03:29 PM
