Blog P.I.

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.”