At first it looked as if the Edwards campaign might have pulled off a real coup. The right wing's opening salvos fizzled. It was attacking Amanda for using bad words and supposedly rewriting her own posts, but nobody outside the blogosphere cared. Then, just when it seemed like the campaign was going to ride out the storm, my worst fears were realized. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League and the right-wing blogosphere aligned for an all-out assault on Amanda.
If it had just been the right-wing bloggers gunning for Amanda, the problem would have been short-lived. Unfortunately, as the Edwards campaign learned the hard way, the right wing has a large network of surrogates, like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill Donohue, who can propel virtually any story into the mainstream media. These professional blowhards are supported by a lavish infrastructure of publishers, partisan media outlets, think tanks, grants, lecture circuits and more.
Republican benefactors lavish funds on the conservative message machine because they recognize the value of a good surrogate. Candidates don't pay their surrogates or give them orders. Instead, they rely on them to say all the outrageous things they can't say themselves.
So far, the left doesn't have much in the way of institutionally supported partisan counterweights. We've got Bill Moyers, they've got Bill Donohue. Explains a lot, doesn't it?
Progressive blogs have the potential to become the left wing's open-source counterpart to the right-wing noise machine. But that doesn't necessarily mean using money and a title to yoke an established blogger to a specific candidate.
There is a breed of blogger that has proven useful working in an official capacity for political campaigns -- the party activist/consultant/blogger hybrid, someone like Matt Stoller of MyDD. Ideally, but not always, that kind of blogger puts his or her own blog on hold while being paid by a campaign, perhaps returning to it once the race is run. And the content of a party activist's blog is heavy on poll numbers, policy discussions and electoral minutiae. An opposition researcher might unearth something allegedly "intemperate" from the archives and use it against the candidate, but that risk is less than with the other style of blogger, an independent polemicist like Amanda.
I can also see the argument for letting these party activists maintain their own blogs while working for a campaign, provided there's full disclosure. In 2006, the Jim Webb Senate campaign put two bloggers from Raising Kaine, Josh Chernila and Lowell Feld, on its payroll. Feld had launched the blog in 2005 with the express purpose of helping elect Democrat Tim Kaine governor of Virginia (Kaine won). Feld and Chernila then cofounded the draft movement that pulled Jim Webb into the Senate race, and Raising Kaine became one of the chief cheerleaders for Webb before the 2006 Democratic primary. When Webb eventually hired Chernila and Feld -- Chernila as deputy field director and grass-roots coordinator, Feld as netroots and online fundraising coordinator and blogger -- he wasn't paying them to say or do anything they didn't already fully endorse.
In my opinion, though, the real lesson of the Webb campaign is how effective bloggers can be when they're outside the campaign. I think the candidates who benefit the most from the netroots are the ones who can inspire bloggers to do their work for free. They create unpaid, unofficial surrogates. Webb is a netroots success story because his team captured the imagination of independent bloggers and online activists.
It was always clear that the netroots adopted Webb, not the other way around. His people figured out a way to make the relationship work. Throughout the race, besides hiring Feld and Chernila, his staffers also diligently cultivated relationships with bloggers outside the campaign. The Webb team started taking the pulse of the larger blogosphere before the Democratic primary -- and their candidate's primary victory was due, in part, to intense Internet support.
Some candidates effortlessly attract blogger buzz, but love at first sight is rare. Usually it takes a little more work to build relationships. Campaigns "work" bloggers more or less the same way they work the mainstream press. They send out e-mails and press releases. They make phone calls. They make their candidate available for interviews. They invite bloggers to campaign events. They network in person at Drinking Liberally or the YearlyKos convention. Webb's team was especially good at maintaining lines of communication with bloggers, and benefited from the netroots' infatuation with their candidate.
When Webb's videographer captured George Allen's "'macaca' moment," therefore, the campaign had a ready-made, receptive audience. All the campaign had to do was upload the video to YouTube and send out some well-targeted e-mails to bloggers and other supporters and wait.
Supporters forwarded the clip to their friends. Bloggers started posting the video on their sites. The "macaca" clip got more than 600,000 views on YouTube alone and exploded into the mainstream media.
The vast majority of bloggers who pushed the story didn't just seem like they were independent of the campaign, they were. They were unabashedly partisan, but they weren't paid operatives. The Webb campaign didn't want to push the video itself, but hoped that it would capture the imagination of supporters on the outside.
If the Webb campaign had pushed the video directly, the campaign would have been criticized for going negative. Instead, it left a tasty tidbit where bloggers would seize upon it.
In general, because of the candidate's popularity, and because of the relationships it had cultivated, the Webb campaign was able to benefit from much rowdier surrogates than Amanda Marcotte without paying for them. In addition to the "macaca" storm, pro-Webb blogger Mike Stark actually got arrested while covering an Allen campaign rally. The incident made national headlines. The video of Stark being carted away in handcuffs reinforced Allen's image as a bully in the last days of the campaign. It's unclear whether Stark's self-assigned political theater ultimately helped the Webb campaign at the polls, but it didn't hurt.
The Edwards campaign wants decentralized people-powered politics. Ironically, by hiring well-known bloggers to manage a destination Web site, it was actually centralizing and micromanaging. Every campaign needs a blog, but the most important part of a candidate's netroots operation is the disciplined political operatives who can quietly build relationships with bloggers outside the campaign. And the bomb-throwing surrogates need to be outside, where they can make full use of their gifts without saddling a campaign with their personal political baggage.
About the writer
Lindsay Beyerstein is a photojournalist based in New York City. She blogs at Majikthise.
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