Edwards and bloggers
I’m fascinated to hear that both Amanda from Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister have taken jobs with the John Edwards campaign. Amanda will be their blogmaster and Shakes will be their netroots coordinator.
I’m intrigued both by their choice of Edwards and by the Edwards’ campaign choice of them out of all the bloggers they might have picked. (Maybe it will put to rest for once and all that stupid "where are the women political bloggers" question.) I’ve been fence sitting, but this might help push me off. I need to think about it a bit. (And yes, I know the election is nearly two years away. My dad keeps nudging me that if I want to do something other than knock on doors, I need to pick a team early.)
It’s going to be very interesting to see how the internet affects this campaign. It’s amazing how much the political landscape has changed just since the 2004 campaign. Blogs weren’t ubiqitous and you tube didn’t exist.
February 2nd, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Edwards seems to be investing a lot of energy in the “women’s vote” and I am thrilled. It’s about f’n time that someone did something other than pay lip service to us.
He’s hired two great women leaders for his internet team. Today’s speech at the DNC winter meeting opened with a tribute to Molly Ivins and then talked about women’s health. I don’t remember Hillary saying a peep about women’s pay equity or health, and she’s supposedly the “woman’s candidate”. To be fair, Clark is the only one who I recall mentioned pay equity today. I really appreciate that from him.
February 2nd, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Ooh, that’s pretty exciting! I was actually an Edwards fan in 04, and I’ve been thinking about him again this go around. My mom and I just had a long conversation about the race. She’s on the fence too, but also mentioned Edwards as someone she’s interested in.
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:55 am
Yeah, Edwards is definitely positioning himself as the one who “gets it” most on bread & butter issues. I think he’s doing a good job, so far. It’s funny, it was during the ’04 election that I first started reading (mostly male-driven) political blogs, and also when I burned out on them (dKos, I’m looking at you). I ended up just not being able to stand the constant fighting on the blogs, while feeling like those were the very people who needed to be going out and engaging voters who were off-line. I’m curious about how I’ll feel about the political blogosphere, leading up to the ’08 election.
February 4th, 2007 at 9:00 am
I posted on this site in early January, in response to an entry about the Hacker book Great Risk Shift (http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2006/09/tbr_the_great_r.html) “Here’s another risk: getting on the wrong side of a moral panic and an ambitious prosecutor. Doesn’t happen to a Hell of a lot of people, but when it does, wow. My sports-mad ten-year-old – suppose he gets what we think is a long straw in the college lottery and gets admitted to Duke. And we dig a little deeper than we thought we had to to make that happen, and he gets invited to a party at the lacrosse team house, starstruck, thrilled to be there, and a stripper shows up – yikes! This woman decides she hasn’t been treated right, and screams that she’s been raped, and picks random guys out of a line-up, and a prosecutor who wants to get reelected (lets call him ‘Mike N.’)gets a grand jury to indict him. If our family can come up with $15000 a month for really good defense lawyers to scrutinize everything about the case for flaws, and to get them into the national press, we can save him. If not, it’s twenty years.” – and I’ve been following the whole Duke lacrosse case train wreck since that time.
A lot of people are paying attention, appalled attention, and the political complexion of the commenters at sites like Durham-in-Wonderland (http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/) is interesting, the blog writer is an Obama backer, and the commenters go from rightists who write ‘nutroots’ when talking about Dean Democrats to, well, Dean Democrats. Governor Easley has just given a speech in which he stated that Mike Nifong is his single worst appointment, the NC Bar is considering censure or disbarment for Nifong, Susan Estrich has written her worry that the lies told by the claimed victim here will by themselves substantially worsen the tendency not to take sexual assault victims seriously when they report crimes. The President of Duke has invited the two accused who have not yet graduated to come back to Duke and rejoin the lacrosse team. What’s wrong with the case? Just about everything: the students charged were picked from a line-up including only lacrosse players. One of them has electronic evidence that he was at an ATM machine across town at the time the accuser said he was raping her. The accuser, after DNA tests showed DNA from four men – none of them a lacrosse player – in her anus and vagina, recanted her claims of penis penetration. All of the men who attended the party stated that the accuser’s claims were not true. There are time-stamped electronic photos showing the accuser stripping and appearing cheerful at the time she says she was being raped in the bathroom. So: tremendous uncertainty whether anything chargeable happened, and further uncertainty whether, if it did, the three guys charged were the ones who did it. AND Mr Nifong was running for reelection at the time, and wanted reelection very badly because his ultimate pension would go up dramatically.
Amanda Marcotte has posted on this set of events, one of her posts was quoted at Durham in Wonderland “In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out…” Further from Durham in Wonderland: “After James Taranto [Wall Street Journal] brought attention to the words above, Marcotte deleted them (so much for “transparency” in the Edwards campaign). Her new statement?
‘Since people are determined to make hay over this quick shot of a post, I’m deleting it and here’s my official stance. The prosecution in the Duke case fumbled the ball. The prosecutor was too eager to get a speedy case and make a name for himself. That is my final word.’”
National Journal Buzz is now calling this the “First blog scandal of the 08 Campaign” [http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/02/the_first_blog.php]
“Marcotte’s attempts to airbrush her past are fast becoming a black-eye for Edwards, even as he earned raves yesterday for a speech at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in Washington . . . As often is the case in politics (and blogging) — and as a prominent blogger like Marcotte should have known — the cover-up is worse than the crime. And it doesn’t help that Marcotte has been both dismissive and defiant in response to her critics.”
The whole thing is doing Edwards a lot of harm with me – I hadn’t been considering supporting Edwards in the first place, I don’t think ‘Senator’ is a particularly good background for the Presidency, ‘Governor’ is much better, and his one term was not very accomplished. Hiring someone who has expressed herself on the side which is looking worse and worse on this case is just foolish on the part of his campaign.
As well, Edwards’ own choice to build a 30000 square food house – the most expensive house in the county – is also going to come back to haunt him. There will be aerial photos in the general election, superimposed on average houses. Does no one in his campaign remember what the aerial house photos did to Foley and Daschle in their defeats? These guys really do NOT look ready for prime time. How to give the election to the Reeps, again. Tone deaf.
April 17th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/04/how_much_did_th.php
$4770 is what the Edwards campaign paid. not good value for money, I think.
July 6th, 2007 at 9:05 am
This keeps coming back to bite the Edwards campaign just as the Rich pardon keeps coming back for Clintons: http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/07/the_john_edward.php