A Poliblogging Aside

I know I should leave this kind of nonsense alone, but you know how it goes.... anyone who reads political blogs probably knows about this - I think it might have turned up on TV too: a couple weeks ago John Edwards hired a couple bloggers for his campaign blog - Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, aka Shakespeare's Sister. Both are rather aggressive leftist feminist atheists, who, as bloggers do, tend to speak their minds. Well - the right wing clown show immediately sprang to action, led by the particularly ridiculous Michelle Malkin. Well, comedy ensued, but the clowns kept pouring out of the Volkswagon, and before long, out came William Donahue, professional taker-of-offense from an organization called Catholics Against God (or something like that), howling about "anti-Catholic bigotry" from Edwards' new hires. Yeah yeah, they have engaged in some intemperate rhetoric against the Catholic church - they are, after all, 21st century adult women, a group which has a pretty good reason to despise the Catholic church and its policies - if you can't hate the pope, who can you hate? Anyway - John Edwards did not have the option of greeting this clamor with the hearty fuck you it deserves, so he issued a non-apology non-apology, as did the women, and there you go. But you know how those things go - it's been another week and they have both resigned, apparently after Marcotte wrote a review of Children of Men that included the shocking revelation that Christianity is patriarchal, sending the clowns for their noses again....

Anyway. It must mean something, though it's hard to figure out what. It being another year before the primaries actually start, and another 8-9 months before the election. Perfectly sensible people are railing against Edwards for letting Marcotte and McEwan go - but really: they were a pretty small part of the campaign - I suspect this "controversy" is a pretty small issue as well. Who actually cares what a couple bloggers think? Other than bloggers and blog readers? Professional thugs like Donohue will find someone to attack no matter what - if there's nothing there, they'll make it up. Still - there are other dimensions to this. From a blogging perspective - I'm with Yglesias here: I don't quite understand why they were hired in the first place, or why they took jobs with the Edwards campaign. I'm sure both women have skills and talents that would make them valuable to the campaign - but they weren't hired for their skills and talents, they were hired for their online personae. And both of them have rather aggressive, at least "outspoken" personae - especially Marcotte. How does that fit with a political campaign? Edwards isn't trying to raise hell here - maybe if he were - okay. But it still strikes me as odd.

Political bloggers, especially, seem to me to fall into three styles, that I might as well call evangelists, edifiers, and exhorters. Evangelists go out and try to convert people to their positions - they preach to the unconverted. Exhorters preach to the choir - they rally the troops, they build resolve and inspire action. Edifiers argue, explain, analyze - they are the wonks, the pundits - they may address the unconvinced or the convinced - but that's secondary to layign out the positions.... Marcotte, especially, is a classic exhorter type: she preaches to the converted - she stirs them up - she puts them in a fighting mood. She galls the other side - and she may very well turn off the undecided. Which is the problem - political campaigns need evangelists, not exhorters. (Though to be fair: the problem with calling them "evangelists" is that you don't have to be spreading good news: you can preach doom and destruction; you can condemn - it's a similar role, though - you are taking a message to people outside your group, to make them change. Jeremiah and Jonah were evangelists, basically; William Donahue, for all intents and purposes, is an "evangelist" - trying to get people to turn on Edwards. Political campaigns can do that too - the right wing does plenty of it, though not so much through blogs.) But politics needs exhorters - people like her serve their purpose, defining the issues, staking out the limits, and inspiring the "base". It seems to me that hiring her took her away from the role she is most suited for. So, in the end - this might actually be for the best.

It definitely is for the best re Shakespeare's Sister - that is a damned good blog. I'm certainly not going to be reading any politicians' blogs, even when the election campaigns get going for real - so it's just as well that the good bloggers don't disappear down that rabbit hole....