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The Blogger Who Wouldn't Work For Edwards

Some Democratic bloggers chastised and even ridiculed me when I called a controversy surrounding Democrat John Edwards the first blog scandal of Campaign 2008. But a month later, the episode is still generating scads of commentary in both the blogosphere and the mainstream media.

Last week's coverage included a Boston Globe column by Ellen Goodman.

"This may be the first certifiable staff flameout of the 2008 campaign," Goodman wrote. "But it's also about a clash between two cultures and two languages. We are living now in both the blogosphere and the mainstream. One is ironic and edgy, challenging and partisan. The other is cautious and modulated."

Dean Barnett of HughHewitt.com didn't care much for the column, particularly Goodman's grasp of what blogs are all about.

"[W]hat really grates is Goodman’s summation about the blogosphere, that 'you win attention with controversy and get hits with an over-the-top persona and a vivid vocabulary,'" he said. "Really now -- what blogosphere is she watching?"

This week, Salon.com published the story of Lindsay Beyerstein of the blog Majikthise, who declined an invitation to blog for Edwards -- in large part for the reasons that created the controversy.

"I tried to explain this [to an Edwards staffer] as delicately and clearly as I could: A-list polemicists are popular because they say things you don't hear on television," Beyerstein said. "The blogosphere isn't just 'The Situation Room' with swear words, it's a space for writers to explore ideas that are outside the bounds of mainstream discourse. If you hire these larger-than-life personalities to blog for John Edwards, they'll have to stop espousing many of the radical policy positions and unconventional values that made them popular in the first place."

Beyerstein's firsthand account also touched on another subject that won me the scorn of political bloggers in December -- my argument in a New York Times column that it might seem strange for independent-minded bloggers to go to work for campaigns. For Beyerstein at least, her desire to remain independent was a factor in her decision not to join the Edwards campaign:

My blog means more to me than any job I've ever had. After three years of hard work, I finally have a platform from which to express ideas that won't get a hearing in the established media, let alone in mainstream Democratic politics. So the prospect of giving up my untrammeled freedom to blog press releases for John Edwards gave me pause. Still, I assumed Bob [her pseudonym for the Edwards staffer] would say it was a necessity.

I was wrong. Bob promised that I wouldn't have to give up my personal blog. He added that I probably wouldn't have much time left for personal blogging, since everyone was working 18-hour days on the campaign. But, he noted, he hadn't given up his own blog, and neither had another member of the Edwards Internet team.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. A bunch of Internet staffers with private blogs sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. I knew that if I was blogging for Edwards, anything I said on Majikthise would be a potential liability for the candidate, even if I wasn't talking about politics.

And aside from the risks to the campaign, I wasn't sure this arrangement would be healthy for my blog. With this responsibility weighing on my mind, how could I continue to deliver the independent perspective that my readers value? If I were suddenly on a candidate's payroll, yet still posting my own "independent" thoughts on Majikthise, what would my longtime readers think? Would they still trust me? Should they? Full disclosure wasn't going to solve the problem of divided loyalties.

Beyerstein's story prompted another round of blogospheric debate about bloggers and campaigns. The highlights -- including a comment from Amanda Marcotte, one of the bloggers involved in the scandal -- are in the extended entry:

-- Ann Althouse laughed at Beyerstein's suggestion that only right-wing bloggers are guilty of "scalping" -- picking a target and harassing him or her (or the employer) until they resign or are forced out of the public eye. "I have the personal experience of lefties trying to do exactly that to me -- including on Beyerstein's blog," Althouse said. Later, she made the case for more independence by bloggers rather than more collective action.

-- The American Scene: "[T]he appointment of Ben Domenech as the Post's conservative blogger inspired a tidal wave of attacks from nearly every left-wing blog there is, with liberals eagerly digging through his archives to find examples of racism ... and other fireable offenses. They got lucky and found something legitimate -- Domenech's long history of plagiarism -- but the campaign to 'scalp' him existed independently of his actual sins."

-- Majikthise: "The scalp-taking metaphor is apt. Not only do right wing blogs swarm to get people fired, they cherish [the] trophy as a symbol of their collective power and a warning to their enemies. That's the really insidious part of scalping as a political strategy. It's all about intimidation."

Marcotte joined the conversation at Majikthise, equating the scalping technique to "McCarthyism." "I suppose the most common term for their technique is 'McCarthyism,' which is to say using blacklisting as a way to take away protected rights. Okay, you technically have the right to free speech and free association, but thanks to blacklisting, you only have that right if you're willing to give up eating."

-- Right Wing News: "If anything, blogs on the right have gone after people like Dan Rather, Trent Lott, and Amanda Marcotte for things they've specifically said or done as opposed to going, "I don't agree with them politically, so let's dig up something to nail them with," which is what both sides of the blogosphere do to politicians."

-- Andrew Sullivan: "Personally, I'm all for making life difficult for bloggers who have whored themselves out as paid propagandists for campaigns. But it's always best just to expose ugliness and dishonesty, not punish it."

-- And before Beyerstein's article was published at Salon, Mark Schmitt offered this thought on campaign bloggers at TPMCafe: "The bloggers' voice can be vulgar, can be fierce, can be wonky ... can be satirical, can be critical of its own favored candidates. But that voice cannot be and should not be the voice of the campaign itself. The candidates who will take advantage of the new politics are those who can let go and live with those voices on the outside, whether bloggers or field organizers."

Posted by Danny | 12:17 PM

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