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.
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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.
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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.”
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Links, Context and Little Green Footballs
The New York Times Sunday Magazine this weekend features a long article about the fallout between Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs fame and the rest of the anti-jihadist rightosphere. If nothing else it provides a solid overview for anyone who has noticed LGF’s change in focus over the past year, or read his November post “Why I Parted Ways With the Right” but didn’t remember too much about the controversy surrounding the presence of a representative from fringe Finnish political party Vlaams Belang at a 2007 Brussels conference that presaged it. You can get a good sense of the dispute by reading posts by Johnson and his enemies at Memeorandum; for context, I especially recommend Patterico and R.S. McCain.
But what interests me even more is the intellectual framework writer Jonathan Dee imposes on the proceedings. While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination. It’s impossible for me to say whether this is true in Johnson’s case, but Dee at least presents a persuasive case.
Key excerpts:
Fans of Don DeLillo may recall the final pages of his 1997 novel “Underworld” (no relation to the graphic novels, film series nor English techno artists) where the characters Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover are joined for eternity in cyberspace, “a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information. Everything is connected in the end.” Well, I did, anyway.
Meanwhile, Dee makes a secondary point that this blurring of context may contribute to a conflation of conflicting perceptions which one may find too often in online discourse:
I cannot say that is what is happening here — I’m certainly not about to be pulled into a discussion of Vlaams Belang. And while misreadings of intentions are not new to online discourse, I think there is a “flattening effect” or, to borrow a metaphor from television, “time-shifting” of opinion which can sometimes confuse more than enlighten. Such confusion may be innocent, but it is also open to exploitation. With no information online separated by more than a few clicks, anyone can choose their own context. And in the blogosphere, some choose contexts incompatible with others’ — even if only for the sake of argument.