Well, every other blogger on earth—and probably whatever extraterrestrials may be on Livejournal as well—has already weighed in on the Amanda Marcotte/John Edwards bruhaha, so I figured I might as well sit this one out. Then I had some sort of nightmare last night, in which—the details are a little fuzzy—I was somehow working as a Webmaster on Michelle Malkin’s senatorial campaign. I think we can safely assume that this one passed through the gates of ivory, but it’s still sufficiently horrifying on any number of levels that I’m hoping posting about it will somehow exorcise the whole topic.
At a first pass, I was a little surprised Amanda herself didn’t foresee this and warn the campaign off. Frankly, I find most of the posts that are getting quoted and passed around the blogs as examples of her perfidy pretty anodyne. She says “fuck” a bunch, is acerbic toward Christian fundamentalists, and seems excessively willing to assume that accusations of sexual assault directed at jocks are automatically credible in the face of ample countervailing evidence. Be still, my heart. Nonetheless, I recognize that my sense of what’s over-the-top may not play in Peoria. For one, I’m fairly contemptuous of the trend toward regarding harsh or snarky criticism of religious (or, for that matter, atheistic) beliefs—propositions capable of being true or false, credible or silly, benign or pernicious—as a form of “bigotry” on par with racism. Still, while I think I tend relatively civil as bloggers go, I guarantee my first reaction to any campaign that asked me to come onboard in a remotely visible capacity would be along the lines of: “What, are you nuts?”
However, insofar as Edwards seems determined not to can Marcotte or Melissa McEwan, that may at least be a healthy sign that people are finally developing some resistance to this noxious gotcha-tactic of fishing for anything that might fuel a round of outrage kabuki. The alternative, as more and more of us commit our instant reactions to a whole welter of events to the immortal archive of the Google cache, would be increasingly intense vetting and self-censorship of and by not just candidates for elected office, but anyone associated in any way with any political campaign. If we can get off that path—and encourage bloggers to find more efficient uses of their time than mining the Web for things to get upset about—so much the better.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Tim // Feb 8, 2007 at 5:20 pm
I certainly think there’s something to be said for toning down outrage kabuki, but I also think there are a couple of plausible distinctions that might be drawn here. One is that campaign spokespeople should probably be held to a higher standard, self-censorship wise, than people who do behind-the-scenes work for a campaign. Being John Edwards’s official blogger is a little bit different from being his secretary or the guy who writes scripts for his campaign commercials.
Secondly, I agree that contemptuous statements about religion are ho-hum, but aren’t her comments about the Duke case in a slightly different category? “Innocent until proven guilty” is a pretty fundamental part of our justice system, and someone who’s willing to ditch that principle so cavalierly makes me question her judgment on other policy topics.
Edwards had literally thousands of liberal bloggers to choose from. If he chose these two, I can only assume it’s because he (or his staff) liked what they had to say. Given that she wrote the Duke post less than a month ago month, I don’t think it’s crazy to think that at the very least, it demonstrates either poor judgment or a very sloppy vetting process.
2 dylan // Feb 9, 2007 at 9:45 pm
The pun in the headline is top shelf, Sanchez.
3 Julian Sanchez // Feb 10, 2007 at 2:59 am
Tim-
I agree the Duke stuff is the least defensible of the items that have been cited but, (1) “innocent until proven guilty” is a legal standard, not a bar to individuals expressing opinions about whether they think someone is probably guilty–OJ comes to mind, and (2) Marcotte’s personal history here disposes me to cut her a certain amount of slack when it comes to a “believe the accuser” bias in this kind of case.
4 Avedon // Feb 14, 2007 at 7:21 pm
I agree that a campaign would have to be crazy to hire me in this climate, but since neither Amanda nor Melissa were in policy-related positions, they were in a category that just last week was considered off-limits – ordinary staff. We’ve really never seen this kind of attack on minor staff people before.
But I’d refuse to work on a campaign because it would ruin my greatest advantage as a blogger: I don’t know these people and have no personal relationship to them.
(I did enjoy tea with Mo Mowlem, but she’s dead, and I don’t write all that much about British politics, anyway. The politicos I know who are still in government are people I disliked even before they were in government, so the fact that I dislike what they do in government isn’t being diluted by any personal friendships.)