Putting the blogosphere under a magnifying glass
You think you might have your cell phone turned off while you’re on the floor of the House of Representatives debating the war in Iraq. Or not:
Listen during the silence. Apparently, the House Chamber is actually a movie theater, and at least one member of Congress is that one guy. And that guy is a jerk. (Via Atrios.)
And don’t miss the chyron about midway through the video:
Okay, now he’s toast.
ActBlue seems to be an effective online fundraising tool, but apparently it’s good for something else, too: Hiring them can give casual observers (and even professional reporters) the impression that your campaign is has found El Dorado in the political blogosphere:
Supporters have contributed just $81 toward [Hillary Clinton's] campaign on the affiliated grass-roots funding site ActBlue, compared with well over $1 million for Mr. Edwards.
That comes from Amy Schatz in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, but let’s not pick on her exclusively — as Not Paul Begala pointed out here a few weeks back, Chris Cillizza just made the same mistake at The Fix. Which, ironically, has itself not been fixed.
For those of you just tuning in: ActBlue is no longer just a nifty website that lets bloggers raise money from their own page. No, it has become a full-fledged vendor for legitimate candidates. Edwards is one; Sen. Clinton is not. Every dollar that goes through Edwards’ website gets added to the ActBlue total [Update: Not exactly; see this comment], and not everybody with a keyboard and a credit card is “netroots.”
Attention, readers! If you see other examples of ActBlue fundraising totals for Edwards (or Bill Richardson) being touted as evidence of strength among the online activists, let us know. This notion deserves to be squashed before yet another mainstream political reporter falls victim.
Meanwhile, Simon Owens at Bloggasm adds another fifteen seconds to the Edwards blogger fiasco by interviewing the one that got away, Lindsay Beyerstein, who imagines herself in Marcotte’s shoes:
I don’t know whether I would have ultimately resigned or not. I don’t think so–unless I was under immense pressure to do so from inside the campaign. I’m just stubborn that way. Resigning would have meant conceding. On the other hand, resignation might have been the best thing for the campaign. Personally, I think that the furor would have died down eventually when people realized that a campaign blogger just blogs press releases and not their own stuff.
Assuming that blogger wasn’t concurrently posting at her (or his) own site, perhaps so. And if the first part of her answer didn’t cause visions of a six-week public relations nightmare swallowing the campaign like the Book of Exodus — albeit a less-plausible scenario, as Beyerstein manages to do progressive feminism without the four-letter words — another part of the interview should give pause. The part where she explains how she ended up writing about the experience of her non-experience for Salon:
Amanda wrote about her experiences in Salon. They published one of my photos to illustrate Amanda’s article. So, I emailed Amanda and asked her which editor she worked with for the article. Then, I wrote to the editor and pitched the story.
Just as story was about to go away, no less. With online allies like these, maybe John Edwards should get a dog.
I guess now is as good a time as any to revisit the subject of ABC PAC. Earlier this year I criticized the venture as insufficiently derivative of ActBlue, which understandably vexed some of those involved.
As another of those involved, Heritage’s Robert Bluey, put it shortly after,
The folks at ABC PAC should take that advice and start by hiring a full-time executive director on par with Benjamin Rahn, president of ActBlue. Without anyone in charge, ABC PAC is doomed for failure.
As far as I am aware, nothing has changed with the project in the intervening period. So, how is ABC PAC is doing now?
It’s still a centrally-planned draft movement for several candidates who have already entered the race and some who never will (no Fred Thompson, yes Mike Bloomberg?) from the same team that brought you McCain’s phony social network, and the total raised has itself risen just $87 in three months.
The cycle is long and the future is unknown, so I cannot declare the venture a failure. However, it would not be inaccurate to call the website “failing.”
I belong to a Facebook group called The Beutlers, dedicated to a family name common in Germany but not so much here in the states. Yet there are obviously enough of us to warrant a Facebook group facilitating the discussion of what it means to be a Beutler. One member, who happens to be a relative of mine and is something of an expert on the subject, explains:
Most of the Beutlers in this country come from the German part of Switzerland, from the little village of Trubschachen, Bern canton. There are a lot of them in Utah and Idaho, and they are Mormon in background, and came to the U.S. in the late 1860’s. I am part of this group, who uniformly pronounce our name Byootler, which is not correct German Swiss, but that’s how we say it.
There is another Beutler family who are Polish jews who emigrated in the 1930’s. They all pronounce the name “correctly” as “Boytler”.
In fact, soon piped up another group of Beutlers — the “Bite-lers.” It’s that Beutler clan which has contributed the most notable Beutler that I know of, former Nebraska sate Sen. Chris Beutler (D-Lincoln).
I don’t know much about these Beutlers, although they can’t be all bad: the prospective mayor of Lincoln has a (perfunctory) campaign blog (and a MySpace page); 
his nephew belongs to The Beutlers on Facebook.
No, I don’t know much about Chris Beutler or the election under way, but I do know one thing: I desperately need some campaign swag. Buttons, yard signs, T-shirts, tote bags. You name it, I want it. The election for Lincoln mayor is May 1, just 46 days away. How do I know this isn’t the last time a candidate bearing my surname runs for an office important enough to generate coffee mugs and bumper stickers?
Listen up, campaign staffers: If I do get some Beutler campaign swag, I promise to blog about that. You can’t buy this kind of online buzz! No, you can only barter for it, and I’m willing to haggle. If you’re in a position to negotiate, send me an e-mail.
P.S. About all I know about the campaign comes from his opponents’ press releases, diligently forwarded to me by a friend covering the race. I’ve included one example below the fold. If I get at least a yard sign, I promise I won’t run any more.
Or doink doink or donk donk, or thunk thunk or perhaps merely clunk clunk. TWoP says chung chung.
Like Michael Kinsley, I’ve never seen a full episode of “Law & Order,” so I’m sure there’s a better analogy — but in the will-FDT-run-or-won’t-he whodunit, will this prove to be the smoking gun?
This morning on Fox News Sunday, Fred Thompson delivered an Obama-like confession that he was thinking about running for president. Pressed to explain how he’ll decide whether there’s sufficient interest for him to get into the race, Thompson said:
This day and time, it doesn’t take long to learn what people think.
Very true. So what do people think about him as a potential candidate? Though the really interesting responses so far come from the left, let’s start with the right, whose support he would actually need to get the nomination.
Mark Kilmer, RedState:
The portion of the transcript with his answers to Wallace’s “lightning round” questions … looks pretty good. He gives some specifics and explanations, and others would have to come, but some conservatives might be about to find their man for 2008.
Falcon, Hang Right Politics:
If Thompson does decide to enter the GOP field, as a mainstream southern conservative, he would instantly become the front runner.
Rick Moore, Holy Coast:
Thompson was very, very good, and this interview could help kick start a move to get him in the race. If he got in, he would be the most solidly conservative (and consistently conservative) candidate in the field and would be a very strong candidate.
Thompson is a viable candidate who won’t have to backtrack and change positions on his voting record or positions, will be able to withstand scrutiny and is articulate enough to present his stand on issues in debate. Thompson may be what the Conservative base is looking for in a candidate and will be able to sufficiently challenge others.
If you want a Draft Fred Thompson sticker for your blog, Gribbit’s Word has one for the taking.
And how is the potential candidacy being received on the left? Without a doubt, Thompson seems to be the candidate they respect and fear most:
Cenk Uygur, The Huffington Post:
I have to admit that I was impressed by Thompson. Sometimes when you meet someone you get a sense of whether they are real or fake. And sometimes you are taken in by an amiable, charming person you might not otherwise agree with.
Lets not kid ourselves, Fred Thompson is a Tennessee version of Ronald Reagan, he’s a winner. The GOP gets Mr. Law and Order to run and they have somebody who can get elected President. He’s one guy Hillary, Obama and Edwards don’t want to have to debate on tv, because he’s– like Reagan– trained as an actor. As a democrat, his potential candidacy worries me like no others.
WoodyG’sGuitar, a commenter at Eschaton:
fred thompson is a logical candidate for somebody, given his ubiquity through the L&O series as the ultra-conservative, real-politiking, pragmatic DA… if they put him up, he’d be hard to beat, in the media-saturated culture of the age, with his senatorial experience, and his name recognition…
Quentin Compson, from the same thread:
Fred Thompson on Faux Noise looks like he lacks the health and vigah required for a presidential run. Good, probably.
Indeed, this wasn’t Thompson’s best appearance — and his appearance wasn’t the best, either. 
His hair was thinner and some of his answers were oddly abrupt. Shouldn’t a television actor be more charismatic than this? The picture at right comes from NBC’s official “Law & Order” site; I’d say he seems to lack “vigah” in that one as well. If you only read the transcript, chances are you thought better of the interview.
Meanwhile, Influence Peddler argues that he should be getting in now, while Romney and McCain are stumbling, and late last week Tom Bevan questioned whether Thompson wanted to challenge his good friend McCain, and whether really wanted to do the work necessary to win. Thompson himself said today:
One advantage you have in not, you know, having this as lifelong ambition is that if it turns out that your calculation is wrong, it’s not the end of the world.
And just last month Marc Ambinder reported:
A source close to Thompson said that Thompson will not run for president, period.
If all this seems like it’s coming fast, maybe it seems like that inside Thompson’s camp as well. But if all that stands between Thompson and a presidential campaign is the determination of interest, it seems like this question has already been answered.
For the better part of a week now, Matt Drudge has been promoting Sports Illustrated’s not-very-rigorous contemplation of global warming/climate change:
If nothing else, this should count as an example of the fact that while Drudge himself is a conservatarian of some stripe, his instinct to overhype is not limited by ideology. But when you start talking gloom and doom and Sports Illustrated, there’s really only one way to turn:
And there’s more to it than that. In fact, the global warming story and the definitive meditation on the “SI Jinx” were both written by frequent SI contributor Alexander Wolff. Just one question remains: What does this mean? Does the SI Jinx apply to global warming, thus signifying happy days ahead? Or to planet Earth, signifying a cloudier future than Ron Artest’s?
One thing we know for sure is that when the subject is sports*, never trust Matt Drudge — a lesson SI itself could learn.
*Not unlike other subjects.
Yesterday was the end of an era in Washington, and though it did not pass unnoticed, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that yesterday’s edition of The Hotline was the last one edited by Chuck Todd, who will soon assume the duties of political director at NBC News.
It’s hard to underestimate the magnitude of this change.
When I arrived as an intern at the tail end of the ‘02 cycle, the Hotline was purely an insider’s accessory — wielded by consultants and congressmen in green rooms, lobbyists in cabs and Hill staffers on lunch break. Chuck himself would show up occasionally on the late, lamented “Inside Politics” while most of the staff would check out shortly after deadline, off to fill another watering hole until starting over again at 4:30 a.m. the following day.
But Chuck had bigger things in store for The Hotline, including plans to expand its influence and reach non-subscribers. For one, The Hotline struck an agreement with liquor distributor Diageo to conduct regular opinion polls (alas, no cases of Crown Royal ever appeared on the third floor of Watergate 600). The public debut of The Blogometer was part of this plan, as was Hotline On Call, now one of the top Beltway news blogs (Marc Ambinder writes it, but Chuck hired him to write it). Once CNN had canned “IP” Chuck appeared more regularly on MSNBC, which eventually struck a deal to share and promote content from Hotline and National Journal on a new website, politics.msnbc.com. Then early this year he launched another project he’d been working on for a long time, the Hotline Political Network. And already he’s walking away, on to another challenge.
Of course, I owe a lot to Chuck. He gave me some of my best early assignments — covering the 2003 California recall, the collapse of the Howard Dean campaign, and then of course the blog beat — it was Chuck who realized this blogging hobby of mine could actually have some value to The Hotline. So I feel pretty safe saying I wouldn’t be doing what I am now without him.
Which brings me to the fun part of this post. While I can’t say I made Chuck Todd famous, I can say that I brought him to a new level of public recognition. A year before Time Magazine made “You” their Person of the Year (ahem) they had another gimmick running: anyone could submit a photo on the Time website and upon approval, your picture would play for a few seconds on a Times Square billboard. Me, I uploaded Chuck. And I still have the picture:
Update: The Hotline doesn’t have a replacement new editor yet, so what does the masthead look like?
We’ll see if NBC News will agree to let him continue in that capacity. But today’s Last Call, now that was the final indignity:
This year for Valentine’s Day, Facebook introduced “gifts” — a series of icons designed by early Macintosh icon generator Susan Kare which, for one dollar, users could buy and send along with a short message to another user — a social networking Valentine’s Day card. Big deal, maybe.
But starting last cycle Facebook has sought to cooperate with political candidates, and plenty have accepted (Virginia senator Jim Webb, most amusingly). So now some of the 2008 candidates have official pages, none more popular than — drumroll please — Illinois senator Barack Obama.
Not coincidentally, he’s got the fattest “gift box” of all:
At first glance, you’d think it stuffed with saccharine sweet time-wasters. And so it was, when you clicked through, but in more of a… MySpace kind of way:
Other gifts were just plain goofy:
The following gift exemplifies a concept utilized several times, but here most concisely:
And at least one took a small dig at the current DNC chair:
Still, more than a few were on the racy side:
If it does require one, click here.
How about the other candidates on Facebook? John McCain and Mitt Romney either got none or weren’t accepting them, which if so would be just as well — Webb got just two. Hillary got a whole 13, but because it looks as if she’s letting Facebook handle the admin duties on her page, message control… isn’t quite what it could be:
The week before last, a front-page Washington Post story detailed the pressure currently being applied by the online left to Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a moderate Democrat from Northern California. In all it was well-researched and informative — though you can’t tell from reading the Ellen Tauscher Weekly that it’s written by erstwhile BlogPAC operative Bob Brigham, this story tells you — but it also made two errors I found a little puzzling. See if you can tell from the opening graf:
The Democratic majority was only three weeks old, but by Jan. 26, the grass-roots and Net-roots activists of the party’s left wing had already settled on their new enemy: Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Calif.), the outspoken chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition.
Or the tenth:
Democratic leaders want their activists to focus on beating Republicans. But the grass roots and Net roots believe the political tide is shifting their way, and they can provide the money, ground troops and buzz to challenge Democratic incumbents they don’t like. MoveOn.org had two Bay Area chapters before the election; now it has 15, and they could all go to work against Tauscher in a primary. “Absolutely, we could take her out,” said Markos Moulitsas Zúniga — better known as Kos — the Bay Area blogger behind the influential Daily Kos site.
See it? Since when is the “netroots” the “Net-roots” or the “Net roots”? And need it even be “Netroots”? Not to mention “grass-roots” and “grass roots.” Odd. Newspapers are given to preferring capitalization of recent coinages and separating new compound words, but even that was rendered here inconsistently. I decided to contact Michael Grunwald, who co-wrote the story and last July was the agreeable subject of a slightly critical post here, also pertaining to the use of language. Just as he did then, Grunwald got back to me quickly:
I wrote the story and I wrote “netroots.” I was surprised to see that someone changed it to “Net roots”; I think it makes us look like we’ve just discovered them there Internets.
Quite. Grunwald said he would find out what the Post stylebook called for and, in contrast to the week and a half it took me to get this post on the web, he had the answer in twenty minutes:
So: I spoke to the head of our copy desk: Net roots is one of the latest additions to our stylebook. He says “we’re conservative on the onewordlowercase-ization thing.” For example, Post style is Web site, not website. He also points out that Post style is grass roots, not grassroots — which is what I wrote — so at least we’re consistent.
Consistently preposterous, in my opinion — Web site? — but there you have it.
Incidentally, for all our conservatism on the onewordlowercase-ization thing, Post style is stylebook, not style book.
There you have it. “Net roots” is the Post’s peculiar preference, and the rest are typos. Yet this is not applied evenly across the website: at The Fix, Chris Cillizza gets away with plain old “netroots,” and in the news pages, Charles Babington got away with the same, so long as he threw “scare quotes” around it (even in quotation).
The online and dead tree bureaus of the WaPoCo are separate entities and so maintain separate policies, and this is surely one of them. I won’t go so far as to say this is a reason why newspapers are losing out to the web, but by refusing to acknowledge political phrases as they are actually used, the Post’s editors are undercutting the credibility of their own reporters. Consistency is good, but being consistently correct is better.
The last few weeks have not been good ones for the Edwards campaign, with professional blowhard Bill Donohue shouting the unfortunate comments of short-lived Edwardsville blogress Amanda Marcotte into the New York Times and Washington Post — and Marcotte herself prolonging the story in Salon and the Austin Chronicle. Nor were they helped when Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise filed her own Salon column confirming Elizabeth Edwards’ involvement in blog strategy and claiming she had warned Edwards staffers of how a netroots hire could go wrong.
One reason the incident has been so bad for the Edwards campaign is that it turned an asset — his widespread support among liberal bloggers — into a liability. While few among the netroots actually abandoned him, it exposed the possibility that a wedge could be driven between them — and his campaign hasn’t regained its footing since.
Until now, that is, and John Edwards has none other than Ann Coulter parody Ann Coulter to thank as the leftosphere is working overtime this weekend to turn this year’s CPAC — where Coulter referred to Edwards as a “faggot” — into the political equivalent of this year’s NBA All-Star weekend in Las Vegas (Pacman Jones or no). Call it a reverse Perlstein: the leftosphere always liked Edwards. Now they finally have a reason to rally around him again.
The incident won’t necessarily help him with Beltway handicappers who fault the campaign’s decision-making, although they should be reassured that Edwards quickly released an e-mail letter from campaign chairman David Bonior, pictured below, and worked it into a fundraising pitch, asking for “Coulter Cash”:
Note that they are making the video available on their own site — this is to their credit, as traditional campaign wisdom holds that you don’t want to keep a negative story going. But this attack was so meanspirited and witless and obviously saying far more about Coulter than Edwards that there is virtually no downside.
The rightosphere can denounce her all they like — calling her a “verbal suicide bomber” and likening her to David Duke and Michael Moore — but they can’t make up for the YouTube-ready audience laughter and applause that greeted Coulter’s remarks.
For the same reason, Howard Dean’s call for the GOP frontrunners to denounce Coulter’s remarks was pretty smart, too. He got his presidential denunciations on short order, but some conservatives refocused their ire on him and effectively defended Coulter. Liberal bloggers may have painted a picture of the conservative blogosphere as a mere appendage of the right-wing establishment, but there’s no way Glenn Greenwald will let Ed Morrissey speak for the movement on this one.
Only CPAC can do that now. Will the conference organizers announce that Ann Coulter will not be invited next year? Her post-9/11 “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” column got her axed from NRO, so they would even have the cover of precedent. Or are they too fearful losing Coulter’s College Republican fan base?
P.S. What do we make of the fact that PoliPundit blogger and Duncan Hunter campaign paid staffer Michael Illions is one of the few conservative bloggers publicly standing by her, while this same week the Hunter campaign cut loose two South Carolina operatives for making bigoted statements? Just asking.
P.P.S. Beyerstein got at least one thing wrong in her Salon column — Matt Stoller, whom she cited twice as a better potential hire than herself or Marcotte, missed the boat entirely as this was breaking last night:
I called a contact at the Edwards campaign for a response. Nothing yet. It would be stupid to respond to Coulter, but it’s a good idea to hang Coulter around Romney and Giuliani’s neck.
Right. Certainly nothing you’d want to use to solicit campaign contributions…
