Any Reasonable Campaign

This is probably the last thing you'll ever need to read about the Edwards bloggers and the resultant teacup tempest: every party involved, in one way or another, was wrong.

First of all, there's something people don't seem to understand about the internet: it is an unblinking eye, an ever-vigilant chronicle of everything you write and publish. I've been writing on the internet for years and I understand that I am responsible for what I have written. It lives on, and if I am hunting a job to be the public internet face for a national campaign, I would be in the disclosure business. I would provide the campaign with every questionable thing I'd ever published after some diligent hunting and make sure they knew what they were getting.

That doesn't mean I wouldn't go out for the job, or would think I'm an ill-considered choice to be the digital citizen journalist for a campaign. I would simply want everyone to understand what they were getting. In the interest of humor I've written some things that might turn a head, or even a stomach, but I would be hard-pressed to say that the great volume of my work has been anything other than reasonable, if sometimes impassioned, so that means I might work out. I could be wrong about that, and if I figured out I was wrong about that through the course of trying to work in that capacity on campaigns, I'd write a book instead. Or consult. You have to understand that a campaign can't be about anyone but the candidate, and if your collected works are potentially problematic, you have to live with that.

Second: you should be responsible enough to understand that when the vast majority of your canon is strident, unflinching, intellectually provincial derision of entire majority swaths of the United States' electorate, you may not be the best choice to head up a national campaign's public blog. You can consult to your heart's content. You can edit in that capacity, and work with a campaign to develop content that spans the entire cycle and establishes a cognizant narrative for your candidate. You just may not be the one who's name should be on it. If you can't handle that, you are not ready for prime-time.

So, that brings us to whoever hired McEwan and Marcotte in the first place: that person should be fired so hard. Not because people should dislike bloggers, not because McEwan and Marcotte are bad people; not for any other reason than this is presidential politics. It is serious business, and there are certain truths about it that no amount of wishing will change. One of those inalienable truths is that every detail matters. In a role in which you are hiring people to be a public face for a campaign, you have to vet them. The easiest thing in the world is to google someone's name, especially if they blog. If you are hiring them to blog, you may want to read what they have written in the past. If I were John Edwards I would have whoever hired them drawn and quartered.

I understand that a comment like this may not be popular among bloggers. I was a blogger for years before people started paying me to write, and I understand the need to protect your own, and the sense of community. However, since I am one of you, I don't feel bad about addressing the outrage over what happened to the girls: you're wrong to complain about Edwards' treatment of the situation. You're wrong to complain about the strident criticism from Donahue and Malkin, full of double-standards as they are, because that's what they do. It's how they make money, and a hard dollar is a hard dollar. If you throw a goat in an alligator pen, I'm willing to bet the alligator is gonna eat that goat. To keep running with a fun analogy, in presidential politics, your guy is the goat, so you have to keep him away from as many alligators as possible.

The argument has also been made that Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin get to say whatever they want, so why can't bloggers? Well, bloggers can — they just can't say whatever they want and then work on campaigns. Ann Coulter publishes books and is more or less only beholden to her own opinion, which she embraces and promotes, because it is her job. Malkin likes to style herself as a journalist, but she's a pundit, and barely qualifies as even that.Again, having brazen, divisive opinions is her job. Similarly brazen, polarizing opinions bring readership to blogs and even allows some of those bloggers to make a living at it — being divisive is either a hobby or a job. When you work on a campaign, your job is to promote your candidate. That's it. You can't have it both ways, and to claim that you have a right to be sensationalist on sensitive subjects and also work on a campaign is asinine. It means you don't understand politics.

If you want to play the game, you have to know the playing field. Blogs are an important part of politics now, and there's going to be some stumbling while the medium grows into its shoes. You have to be reasonable, and if you can't be reasonable, unless you're working for a totally polarizing candidate whom your past writing will in no way damage, you don't get to work on a presidential campaign, and you probably shouldn't be working on any credible campaign to begin with. "People-powered politics" doesn't mean you get to live in a vacuum, totally endorsed from the hard reality of politics; you have to live in the same world as the rest of us.