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Archive for the 'Defections' Category

Four Blogs, Two Candidates and One Year Later

Published by William Beutler on May 7, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Daily Kos, Defections, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Instapundit, John Edwards, John McCain, Netroots, Online Fundraising, Primary fights, White House '08, White House '12 and William Beutler. 0 Comments

Balloon Juice, The Daily Dish, MyDD and Taylor Marsh

Three’s a trend, and this is Blog P.I.’s third post in a row leaning on juxtapositions; this time, the subject of two posts from late 2006 and early 2007 have converged in a way I certainly couldn’t have imagined at the time. Both were about bloggers’ attitudes toward the presidential campaign then still taking shape, and if one can make any definitive predictions in politics, it’s that you can never make definitive predictions about the future. And this is all the more true on the morning after the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.

  • In October ‘06 it was The Agony and the Apostasy, about the leftward drift of two well-known (onetime) conservative bloggers, Andrew Sullivan and John Cole. Sullivan claims to believe everything today that he believed in the early 2000s, but the day-to-day effect of his blogging is pretty much the opposite. Cole has gone from a Republican supporter of the Iraq war to a sarcastic critic of all things Republican.
  • Then in January 2007, Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, the Netroots and Peter Daou, a lengthy reported piece about the Internet advertising campaign directed by Daou, coinciding with the official launch of Clinton’s presidential bid. That post also explored Nevada blogger Taylor Marsh’s incensed reaction to being excluded from the original ad buy. This post also referred to MyDD as “one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left.”

So how much does a year change? Quite a bit. The 2006 post wondered about which way the two apostates would break in the 2008 race:

It seems plausible that Sullivan and Cole could support a Republican for president alongside their erstwhile compatriots, but probably not until after the primary is decided.

My answer, hedging as it was, does not seem to have stood the test of time.

  • In the year and a half since, Sullivan has moved his blog from Time to The Atlantic and, in concert with his recent criticism of the Republican Party and conservative movement overall, he has become one of the most prominent supporters of Barack Obama. So much so that The Atlantic published a December cover essay by Sullivan presumptuously titled “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.” On the Republican side, Sullivan had preferred McCain over the runners-up, in large part based on McCain’s opposition to the Bush administration’s torture/interrogation policies. Of course, Obama holds the same opinion. Sullivan was no doubt pleased with last night’s results in North Carolina and Indiana, but one cannot escape the sense that he’ll miss the Clintons.
  • Cole, meanwhile, has become an even more constant, if not more ardent, supporter of Obama’s candidacy. Like Sullivan a former 1990s conservative, he acquired no later appreciation for Hillary Clinton. And like Sullivan, he now sees her worse attributes similar to what he doesn’t like about the modern Republican party. He remains a member of the Pajamas Media advertising network which is run and largely populated by right-of-center blogs such as Instapundit and Protein Wisdom. But now he’s also been using the Democrat-oriented ActBlue website to raise money for Obama (and Obama alone) which probably makes him the only blog simultaneously affiliated with both Pajamas Media and ActBlue. As for the primary results, Cole was exultant, apparently staying up most of the night blogging the results.

Clearly, neither are rejoining the Republican camp anytime soon. More interesting, though, is what’s happened with Taylor Marsh and MyDD.

  • At the time, Marsh was leaning strongly toward Edwards and was unimpressed by Clinton. But regardless of her displeasure with the Clinton campaign’s ad buy, barely two months later she had changed her mind and made the case for Clinton. Even before then, her site had started to turn anti-Obama, especially after he dissed her home state by skipping an AFSCME-sponsored presidential forum in Carson City. Since then, she has been one of the most ardent pro-Clinton bloggers and one of the most committed Democratic opponents of Obama. And only just this morning, with the primary results clear, is Marsh shifting again: recognizing that Clinton cannot win, she will oppose John McCain without making the case for Obama.
  • Meantime, MyDD has undergone even bigger changes than the other three. In this case it wasn’t a change of mind, but a change of bloggers: in July of last year, the two principal authors, Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, decamped for an entirely new website: Open Left. Their new blog has now become a new leading anti-Hillary site, as MyDD once was. Meanwhile, MyDD has shifted back to reflecting the opinion of the site’s original founder, Jerome Armstrong. Armstrong stepped up his own blogging and brought in a new contributor, pro-Hillary Todd Beeton. Armstrong had previously been a consultant to Mark Warner, former governor of (and all-but-guaranteed future senator from) Virginia, but since he exited the presidential race more than a year ago, Armstrong has become an unflinching proponent of Hillary Clinton. So much so, in fact, that it has been the source of conflict between Armstrong and his former co-author Markos Moulitsas, to say nothing of the wider leftosphere. Today, Armstrong is sounding a little more apathetic than Marsh, merely affirming that the Clinton campaign has the right to continue on.

Taken as a whole, the four websites defy categorization, dissimilar in cause and effect, except in that their content has changed dramatically over time. And I am sure that whether McCain or Obama takes the oath of office next January, I don’t want to make any predictions about which candidates each site will be supporting in 2012.

Wisdom Before it Was Conventional

Published by William Beutler on March 8, 2007 in CNN, Cable News, Defections, Hotline, MSNBC and Metapost. 1 Comment

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:

Chuck Todd, Times Square Person of the Year

Update: The Hotline doesn’t have a replacement new editor yet, so what does the masthead look like?

Chuck Todd, Goatee Model

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:

Chuck Todd, Overserved

The King of Political Cartoons

Published by William Beutler on February 5, 2007 in Defections, Entertainment, Seriously and Website Design. 3 Comments

If there’s one thing Andrew Sullivan changes more often than his opinion about George W. Bush, it’s web hosts. This weekend, as expected, he moved The Daily Dish* from the servers at Time to the servers at The Atlantic. Just try and visit http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/ and see how far that gets you.

The dark blue and white color combination remains the same — perhaps makng it the only consistent attribute of Sullivan’s blog from 2000-2007 — although the banner logo has changed and he has appropriated for sloganeering purposes a phrase from The Atlantic’s founding document: “Of no party or clique.” And the Terry Colon cartoon looked… somehow off. Indeed, it’s a whole new cartoon. Old first, new second:

Terry Colon draws Andrew Sullivan for Time

Terry Colon draws Andrew Sullivan for The Atlantic

A copyright issue, I assume. But the plot thickens: who is that woman in the background? Sullivan attempted to explain:

Some of you have inferred that it’s Ana-Marie Cox, formerly Wonkette. An editor asked Terry about this and I got the impression he doesn’t know who Ana-Marie Cox is. Still, whoever she is, from the office I’m working in, she’d have to be clinging to a balcony on the seventh floor.

Hmm. It would be rather strange if Mr. Colon was unfamiliar with Ms. Cox, considering that he drew a logo for her defunct Time blog, Political Bite:

Terry Colon draws Ana Marie Cox for Time

Not to mention at Suck.com, where they both once worked:

Terry Colon draws Ana Marie Cox for Suck

In any case, it doesn’t look like her, and before long one of Sullivan’s readers had set the record straight.

And while we’re on the subject of defunct Time blogs and Terry Colon, he also caricatured Mike Allen for his little-used The Allen Report. Then Allen defected to The Politico, where he too had another caricature commissioned for him, albeit by another artist. Old and new:

Terry Colon draws Mike Allen for Time

Someone draws Mike Allen for The Politico

If there’s point to be made here, and I am not sure there is, it’s that Terry Colon draws funny pictures. If there are two points to be made here — an assumption even more suspect — I would add that the more you think about it, the more political opinion and comic art go well together.

  • That’s the name of his blog, and always has been — but no one ever calls it that. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Daily News and E! Online, among presumable others, have similarly-named columns.

The Agony and the Apostasy

Published by William Beutler on October 19, 2006 in Blog Fights, Defections, Elections, George W. Bush, Internecine Battles, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Primary fights, Terrorism and White House '08. 4 Comments

Back in 2004, one of the founding members of the political blogosphere managed to blog his way out of the good graces of many he had inspired to take up Blogger accounts in the first place. That was Andrew Sullivan, and while he undoubtedly remains an A-lister, he’s probably already proved a kind of blogosphere peak traffic theory.

Another popular veteran blogger has been steering wider and wider away from his peers in the rightosphere, and unlike Sullivan, it’s one who has called himself a Republican. This is John Cole, the West Virginian Army vet and Pajamas Media signatory who writes Balloon Juice. His site is a rarity in the sense that the chief blogger identifies as right of center, but the readership (as demonstrated by its loyal commenters) leans decidedly to the left. For some time now, Cole has featured a co-blogger, Tim F., who is even more critical of the contemporary right than himself.

Andrew Sullivan, John Cole, conservative blogger discontentBoth Cole and Sullivan have voiced greater concerns about the direction of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism, and about the Republican Party’s priorities regarding social issues than most mainstream conservative bloggers (and more than avowed non-conservative Glenn Reynolds, at least until the “pre-mortem” post). Unlike many of their peers, they’ve lost all respect for the Bush presidency and reclaimed/redefined conservatism enough to justify staying on the same side of the fence.

The very fact of their disagreement isn’t so much the issue — they could have drifted apart and largely ignored each other. Instead, the animosity really has to do with Sullivan and Cole coming around to openly fight with their erstwhile allies. These arguments look like personality conflicts, and they certainly are, but are also so contentious because an ideological fight underlies them.

The fights they pick are not without merit, though it’s sometimes hard to decide which side is thinking about it more clearly, if anyone — and so I’ll punt and just say “follow the links”: a non-definitive summary would note that Sullivan has clashed with Glenn Reynolds and with James Taranto and become an inside joke among numerous other bloggers. Cole is currently in the middle of a blog fight with Dan Riehl, just concluded one with Red State, and before long will probably go another round with Michelle Malkin.

As far as I can tell, it seems Cole usually aims to stand up for decency, Sullivan for his principles. This also seems to mean Sullivan-engaged arguments often revolve around himself — and hey, that’s just what Time is probably hoping for. To use a phrase more commonly associated with the leftosphere, they’re like concern trolls* in the wider conservative blogosphere.

Such blog fights can be either great fun or excruciatingly dull, depending on how much you have invested in the squabbling parties. And considering the war’s prominence in these splits, there will probably be more. Assuming Iraq gets worse before it gets better — that being one thing supporters and opponents of U.S. Iraq policy might agree on — we’ll see more bloggers reach a breaking point, lambasting their spherical allies for failing to understand what they do now, while the stalwarts kick them to the curb and renounce them as apostates.

It’s hard to say what this means for the 2008 White House scrum, currently still in training camp (pre-season begins with the first post-election early primary state straw poll). Both the left and right blogospheres will fracture, sometimes with acrimony and sometimes amicably, as they all back different candidates for president.

Since its post-2002 midterm formation, the leftosphere has been an anti-Bush monolith, and his eventual departure from Washington (and our eventual withdrawal from Iraq) will create new tensions for Democrats and the bloggers who favor them, along with the expected opportunities. If Democrats win the White House in ‘08, we could see the blogospheric equivalent of a geomagnetic reversal — on both sides, existing bloggers would realign, some veterans might lose readership, and newcomers could pick up big traffic.

It seems plausible that Sullivan and Cole could support a Republican for president alongside their erstwhile compatriots, but probably not until after the primary is decided. But I have to wonder, when Cole has been putting his “Republican Stupidity” category tag to much greater use lately compared with his “Democratic Stupidity” one, even though the latter category was once created 10 places before the former.

Of course, if a Republican takes the oath of office in January 2009, things certainly won’t remain static. 9/11 created the right-blogosphere and the Iraq war defined it, but as domestic (social and economic) policy has been inevitably regaining significance compared to foreign policy (which again, they don’t always agree on) things have gotten — and will continue to get — more interesting.

So, let’s settle for a hypothesis: The longer an individual participates in the blogosphere, the likelihood of a political shift dividing said blogger from his or her allies along new lines approaches one.

Note: Additional text and argumentation provided by OXR.

The McCain/Mele Melee II: The Republican Underground & Nicco

Published by William Beutler on August 29, 2006 in Blog Consultants, Campaigns, Defections, John McCain and White House '08. 3 Comments

Yesterday Blog P.I. surveyed the leftosphere’s reaction to former Dean web guru Nicco Mele’s defection to the John McCain camp, taking exception to some bloggers’ condemnations of Mele’s firm, EchoDitto. In this post I survey the rightosphere’s reaction to the same, taking exception this time to Mele’s disclosure w/r/t his firm, EchoDitto. And away we go:

Actually, the news registered only a blip on conservative blogs, where McCain has never been a favorite and the association with Mele is unlikely to change anyone’s mind either way.

But the situation has caused one small headache for the McCain camp: NRO’s Jim Geraghty is sure that Craig Goldman, executive dir. of McCain’s Straight Talk America PAC, had deceived him about the extent of Mele’s involvement in a conversation predating the Hotline’s scoop:

Even a “no comment” or “I can’t talk about this because no decision on that has been made yet,” would have been fairer. Instead, I’m told that Mele is “offering free advice” when in fact it’s the other way around, that according to the Hotline account, McCain’s people “recruited” Mele. … I’ll let others remark about the irony of this coming from an organization with “Straight Talk” in its name.

Responding, McCain blog consultant Patrick Hynes argues there’s nothing wrong with what Goldman reported, and certainly compared to what Geraghty reported about Hynes’ own disclosure issues, he’s right.

Goldman told Geraghty that Mele has not been paid, and nobody has disputed the claim. Geraghty seems upset that Goldman didn’t inform him that Mele had been around for months, but the distinction between Mele offering and Goldman recruiting strikes me as inconsequential. “Offering advice” is a stock phrase in Washington and says nothing about who approached whom. And as far as I can tell, he never led Geraghty to believe their association was necessarily a recent one. Unless there’s more to it, Hynes is correct: There’s no there there.

But there is another aspect of the McCain/Mele cooperation that strikes me as troublesome: The current McCain/Mele relationship stretches back to last fall, yet Mele didn’t step aside until called out by Hotline just this week. So in the past year since they first hooked up, Mele has been doing paid work for Democrats in his primary job while doing unpaid work for a Republican in his free time. This is highly problematic for EchoDitto, but it doesn’t reflect all that well on the McCain camp, either.

Yesterday I contacted both Mele and interim EchoDitto CEO Harish Rao to determine precisely when the firm became aware of Mele’s after hours freelancing, but still today, I haven’t heard back from either, and assume that I won’t.

But if the first sentence from Rao’s post on the 25th is any indication, then we already know:

Nicco’s recent post about his support for Senator John McCain has caused quite a lot of ruckus.

In the last post, I argued that EchoDitto could survive if they cut all ties with Mele, and I still think that is possible. But if the firm’s clients believe their projects have been compromised by having a secret McCain adviser overseeing said projects, well, this aspect of the Dean campaign legacy will probably be forfeited.

And for a supposed frontrunner, it sounds like McCain’s highest-profile blogger allies are a little reticent about the association being known.

The McCain/Mele Melee I: Embargoed Until Kos Gets Around To It

Published by William Beutler on August 28, 2006 in Blog Consultants, Campaigns, Daily Kos, Defections, John McCain and White House '08. 2 Comments

Last Wednesday at Hotline’s On Call blog, Marc Ambinder and Shira Toeplitz dropped a bombshell on the Democratic netroots the likes unseen since Jerome Armstrong was revealed a stock tout in a past life: Nicco Mele, the web strategist second only to Joe Trippi in credit received for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run, has been informally advising 2008 presidential candidate John McCain. Not to get too pedantic, but Dean is an anti-war Democrat and McCain is a pro-war Republican. Mele’s McCain affinity seems largely based on his efforts, however symbolic, to get money out of politics.

After Dean, Mele went on to found the Democratic-oriented website building firm EchoDitto, which has built a solid reputation for itself. This revelation, however, is causing trouble not just for consultant Mele himself but for his consulting firm as well. And as we’ll get to below, some snap judgments about the announcement have yet to be revised.

Soon after the news broke, and while the leftosphere was scrambling to react, Mele confirmed at his own sporadically-updated blog:

While I currently don’t know what role I’d like to have in 2008, if Sen. McCain runs I hope to be helpful. This is a personal decision for me based on my own first-hand experience. I like Sen. McCain - I think he should be president!

Make no mistake about it — this is conduct unbecoming of a progressive blogger. In one comment section at Daily Kos, he got nicked “Anakin Mele,” and despite emphatic statements that he is not on the McCain payroll, more than a few assumed he’d been bought off.

But among bloggers who know Mele personally, fellow Dean alum Rick Klau stood up for him and identified as a concerned friend:

To those who’ve suggested he’s abandoned his principles to support John McCain, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Misguided? Maybe. A sell-out? No way.

Anonyblogger Vermonter noted in an entry cross-posted on more than one lefty blog that the original Deaniacs weren’t always motivated by partisanship:

One of the things that most people wouldn’t know is that quite a few of the main Dean web people were not at all sharply partisan about Dean and would often say favorable things about his opponents. And had very nuanced opinions about a number of topics. Meaning, well, they were very reasonable, non-dogmatic people. But, McCain, Nicco? Really?

Vermont NPR commentator Philip Baruth saw it as the “latest sign of the netroots migrating” rightward, conflating the episode with former Kerry hand Peter Daou going to work for Hillary Clinton — hardly a move of the same order, especially as Hillary has begun inching away from the Lieberman/Bush position on Iraq.

Most consequentially, however, lead Kossack Markos Moulitsas revealed in his take nothing we didn’t know already, namely that he can’t be friends with people whose political beliefs he doesn’t share:

I used to consider Nicco Mele, a top former Dean webhand, a friend until his rabid desire for regulating the blogosphere led me to write him off.

And he didn’t call for anything he hasn’t called for before, namely Mele’s exile from the left, which MoveOn’s Zack Exley proposed (in another dKos diary) in a considerably more thoughtful manner:

McCain has a credible chance of convincing large numbers of uninformed liberals that he is compatible with a progressive agenda. What he’s got going for him is his association with campaign finance reform, and a personal demeanor full of cultural liberal signifiers. … If he can swing a handful of defections of high-profile progressives, then he’s got a real chance of adding the phrase “McCain Democrats” to the lexicon in ‘08. … Democratic consultants and figureheads need to know that going off to work for McCain means losing their place in the rising Democratic tide.

It’s certainly an appropriate strategy; in national politics, you can switch allegiances exactly once, and as Mele is finding out, even that comes at a price. Of course, if McCain wins the presidency, McCain Democrats won’t be wanting for work. And even if McCain loses, there are worse fates than taking on corporate accounts.

But Kos went further, giving the impression that EchoDitto itself had a material connection to the campaign, because the “expertise and intelligence he is gathering from the following clients can and will end up as part of the McCain arsenal in 2008.” No one can argue with this excerpt, but it implies no organizational responsibility on the part of EchoDitto. The firm’s initial public statement was inadequate, but nevertheless made clear it would have no part in a Republican campaign.

If EchoDitto had remained silent, he might’ve had a point. But I’m still waiting for Kos and a host of others to acknowledge that one evening later EchoDitto New York dir. Harish Rao announced that Mele was stepping aside as CEO:

Nicco’s recent post about his support for Senator John McCain has caused quite a lot of ruckus. We at EchoDitto disagree with his decision. While Nicco does not work for Senator McCain, his support for a possible McCain candidacy runs contrary to many of our core beliefs at EchoDitto. … Everyone in this world has to follow their own heart. Nicco has agreed to, effective immediately, take a leave of absence from our company. We hope he takes some time to re-consider his position. I am assuming Nicco’s responsibilities for the duration of his leave of absence.

Somehow, I expect Rao will be losing the modifier from his “interim CEO” title before long.

Yet the Kos-imposed embargo remains in place. And so does the one from Steve Gilliard. More suprisingly — at least based on my own impression — so does the one from DavidNYC at Swing State Project, and he’d even allowed that the perfect solution would be for McCain Mele to go.

All of which provides an interesting coda to the offensive ally renouncement wars (we really need a better name for that phenomenon) earlier this summer. It is surely too much to ask that bloggers distance themselves from every awful thing said by someone on their own side. But is it really too much to ask that they unrenounce after the key circumstances have changed? As renunciation warrior Glenn Greenwald once memorably asked, when does the “self-correcting” blogosphere start to self-correct?

Update: DavidNYC follows up, and asks some good questions that didn’t occur to me:

I recognize that political consulting isn’t bound by the same rules of professional responsibility, though perhaps it ought to be. So does this leave of absence satisfy me? I can’t say that it does, in part because we haven’t been told what it means. Does Nicco still have access to firm resources? To client information? Is he still drawing a salary or otherwise receiving money from the firm? If Nicco straight-out left the firm, these questions wouldn’t exist. But even if EchoDitto answered them, I’d still be unsatisfied. How long will this leave last? Until Nicco changes his mind and admits his grave mistake? Until the end of the presidential election? Hell, what if - heaven forbid - McCain wins? Do we give Nicco a four-year or eight-year extension? And what if Nicco does come back - and then says he wants to support another Republican? What do we do then?

In an email to me this afternoon, DavidNYC pointed out that considering the degree of controversy, EchoDitto should have contacted its critics to alert them to Nicco’s leave of absence, something it apparently has not done. And as I said earlier, I don’t think Mele’s time with EchoDitto has long to go; they’ve revised their position once already, and I’d bet another is coming. If they don’t do this within another week or two, however, I think their critics would be correct.

Updated again: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Don’t miss the follow-up post, The Republican Underground & Nicco, which points out that either Mele alone or EchoDitto concomitantly concealed his moonlighting from their clients.