Bloggers on the Bus

By Massimo Calabresi

Correction Appended: February 8, 2007

In just a few years of blogging, Amanda Marcotte, 29, has established herself as an outspoken voice of the left, filling her Pandagon blog with posts on everything from conservative "wingnuts" to Catholic "anti-choicers" and the cabal she simply calls BushCo. In late January, more ethics charges were heaped on the District Attorney in the Duke University sexual-assault case, and Marcotte attacked the news with her usual swagger and sarcasm: "Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?"

Nine days later, Marcotte announced that she was leaving Pandagon. The reason? She had joined the John Edwards campaign as blogmaster to manage and help write the official blog and advise the campaign on sharpening its Internet outreach. Within hours of her announcement, right-wing bloggers were giddily digging up her Duke posts. A few days after that, a prominent Catholic group demanded that Marcotte be fired, citing several Pandagon posts that savaged conservative Catholic stances.

The 2008 U.S. presidential race marks the arrival of the star blogger as the hot new campaign commodity, however controversial. Almost every major candidate, from Hillary Clinton to John McCain and Mitt Romney, has hired well-known Web voices to help the candidates tap into the vast fund-raising, organization and communication potential of the Internet. That group is potentially huge: a Pew study of blogs during August 2006 found 4.8 million people blogging, commenting or otherwise sharing political content online.

But bottling the lightning of blogger authenticity is not easy. Many blogosphere activists suspect anyone signing on with a campaign of selling out. And in the era of drum-tight message control, campaigns are not inclined to tolerate the independence bloggers need to maintain their credibility.

Getting the marriage between campaign and blogger right is probably more important for Edwards than for any other Democratic candidate. The former vice-presidential candidate is moving hard to the left to differentiate himself from Clinton and Obama ahead of next year's primary contests. The blogosphere, with its surfeit of Democratic base voters, is a natural target audience: almost a third of the estimated 5 million daily political blog readers identified themselves as strongly liberal in a George Washington University study published last October.

Before the Edwards campaign recruited Marcotte, it found another biting left-wing feminist voice in blogger Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister. He has given overall control of Internet strategy to Mathew Gross, the man who pioneered that job for Howard Dean in 2004. The efforts seemed at first to pay off: Edwards almost always wins the nonscientific but closely watched monthly straw poll organized by liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas. At the Democratic fund-raising site ActBlue, he has raised $765,000 so far, nearly three times as much as any other candidate on the website.

The least tangible, yet most important, asset that bloggers bring to a campaign is their credibility with their fans, which is earned over years and gives their endorsement of a candidate real weight. Joe Trippi, who as Dean's campaign manager in 2004 employed up to six bloggers, says that letting the bloggers operate freely while on the payroll is crucial: he remembers cringing as he read Moulitsas' criticisms of Dean even as the campaign kept writing $2,500 monthly retainer checks.

Edwards and Marcotte, however, may have tarnished the credibility that they both covet. After right-wing bloggers began targeting her, Marcotte announced that she had deleted her most controversial Duke comments. The deletion garnered critics on both the left and right who said she was pandering to Edwards, a former Senator from North Carolina, where Duke is located and where he has based his campaign. The Edwards campaign and its supporters made matters worse by claiming that a technical glitch, not Marcotte, had brought the controversial posts down. And Marcotte referred all interview requests to her new bosses, who declined to let the once prolific talker speak for herself.

Marcotte's pre-Edwards blogging oeuvre may have been provocative and profanity-laced, but it was still not far from the mainstream of the blood sport that is political blogging. And there is a welcome wonkishness to Marcotte, who, unlike some star bloggers, is not afraid to parse policy with her readers. Those qualities helped earn Pandagon, which will continue in the care of other bloggers while she's gone, a dedicated and sizable fan base. Marcotte has made it clear to her fans that working for a campaign requires a change in tone. "I know how the game works," she wrote in a recent post. "I'm more interested in helping my candidate win than anything--luckily we see eye to eye on most issues."

Edwards is not the first candidate to discover the potential pitfalls of putting bloggers to use. McCain's campaign was excoriated for using one as a propagandist when conservative blogger Patrick Hynes admitted last summer he was surreptitiously paid by the candidate while he was writing critical posts about McCain's Republican rival Romney (Hynes is now officially and publicly on the McCain payroll). In 2004, John Thune, the Republican candidate for Senate in South Dakota, paid bloggers to attack supporters of his opponent, then Senate minority leader Tom Daschle. Clinton's big blog hire for this campaign, the well-known Peter Daou, has caused a kerfuffle of his own by buying advertisements on blogs around the country, including conservative sites, drawing criticism from liberal pundits and from bloggers whose sites were left out of the ad buy.

Daou and Hynes have bounced back, but Marcotte may not be so lucky. If Edwards has got cold feet, Marcotte could be out of a job. Even if she survives, though, her supporters have made it clear that they have their own agenda. When she announced that she was moving to the Edwards campaign, hundreds of supporters wrote in to Pandagon to congratulate her. Buried in the pile of warm wishes, however, was a warning of sorts: "Congratulations," wrote a user named MAJeff, "and best of luck. Well, best of luck until we've decided you and your candidate are not pure enough for us and we all turn on you."

The original version of this story incorrectly stated that in 2005, John Thune, a Democratic candidate for Senate in South Dakota, paid bloggers to attack supporters of his opponent, then Senate majority leader Tom Daschle and that a Campaign 2008 straw poll organized by liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas is conducted daily. Thune, a Republican, unseated then-Senate minority leader Tom Daschle in 2004 and Moulitsas' poll is conducted monthly.

The story also mistakenly noted that six days after writing a provocative post about the Duke University sexual assault case Amanda Marcotte announced she was leaving Pandagon to join the John Edwards campaign. In fact, she made her announcement nine days after writing the Duke post.