Hillary Clinton did not wait long after her weekend presidential campaign announcement to step foot in the blogosphere: By Monday her technically fledgling but long-assumed campaign had taken major steps toward engaging web users, starting with her three-night series of half-hour webcasts, which concluded just last evening. Moreover, her camp had sought specifically to engage the dedicated online activists who call themselves the netroots, by promoting the webcasts through the industry standard Blogads service.
Her detractors among those online activists did not wait long, either. At MyDD, one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left, Matt Stoller criticized her team for purchasing ads on some conservative blogs:
Why do people like HRC, no matter how often it becomes clear that wingnuts hate us, seek approval from wingnuts?
Before long, another animadversion came from former Nevada [and current online] talk show host (and recent Stoller employee) Taylor Marsh, who was upset to find she had been left out:
It’s not like her team doesn’t know I exist. I find it a little annoying that Clinton’s team thinks that people like me don’t merit advertisement, simply because our numbers don’t reach the one-hundred thousand mark.
We’ll address the specifics of these charges, but in order to do so, first let’s try to describe the buy itself:
The Clinton team can’t or won’t say what they spent on the buy, but on Monday, Blog P.I. went digging through the extensive a la carte ordering page at Blogads to find out where they had made their buys and make a reasonably educated guess about how much they had spent.
While I am quite sure I did not locate every ad on every blog, the initial buy was worth at least $17,026 across at least 45 blogs. The buy comprised political blogs almost exclusively, liberal blogs overwhelmingly, and primarily those with a national reach. Nearly every liberal blog above 50,000 impressions per week picked up a blogad, though a few did not (as we’ll see below) and at least a few regional and small-traffic blogs also were included. The campaign bought some Premium ads (which are guaranteed to be the top ads visible) on liberal sites but generally stuck with the Standard ads, and went with the bargain buys on each of the conservative blogs included. And how many conservative blogs was that? I counted just four: Hugh Hewitt, Power Line, Captain’s Quarters and Wizbang Politics (i.e. not the front page), each worth between 550,000 and 150,000 impressions per week for a total $1,150.
Yesterday Blog P.I. contacted Clinton’s principal blog adviser, Peter Daou, for elaboration. As he explained, the first round was for the webcasts, the second round (which began last night) was for inviting supporters and potential supporters to submit guest blog posts. According to Daou, future buys will focus on particular issues Sen. Clinton wants to highlight, and in states and regions where she will be traveling. The strategy is not fixed, and more to the point, neither are the number of sites. “A blog being excluded has absolutely no implication, except we’ll get there next time,” Daou said. “We’ll try to get as many bloggers as possible.” For anyone who remembers Daou’s last gig, the blog roundup published by Salon which still bears his name, Daou often went out of his way to reach down and pull obscure blogs up into the mix. To be sure, he’s not spending his own money, and cheap as Blogads can be, even Hillary Clinton does not have unlimited funds. But to the extent he can, it’s reasonable to expect that Daou will keep doing so.
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And on Wednesday night, hours after the final webcast, the ad strategy did indeed shift: At the same time the buy expanded on liberal blogs, it disappeared from the conservative sites. To the Clinton team, it made sense to get attention from the right when the focus was on the webcast, but now that the ads are inviting people to submit guest posts to her site, inviting the “winguts” would indeed be a waste of time. Had they not made this distinction here, Stoller’s gripe surely would have been right.
But here’s the interesting thing: Blogads buys are one-week minimum commitments, though advertisers can change the specific ad as many times as they want — or remove it entirely. This is just what they’ve done: In order to stick to the plan, they have no choice but to pay Power Line and the rest not to run the ad, at least for a few more days (surely someone will compare this to farm subsidies, but no one has; one might say they’re just not into her).
For example, here is a screen shot taken last night, confirming two ads running on Power Line:
But here is the Power Line sidebar as of last night:
Not that the ads necessarily earned anyone’s approval: Dean Barnett, Hugh Hewitt’s co-blogger, took exception and* deemed it a misstep on Hillary’s part:
If Hillary is advertising to reach out to our core audience, she should save her money. I get your emails – I know none of you will be supporting Hillary in the Democratic primaries. … Presidential campaigns are often poorly and profligately run. Howard Dean, for instance, burned through a gazillion dollars getting absolutely no bang for his bucks and couldn’t tell you at the end of the day where all the money went.
Barnett surmised that Clinton’s “purchaser didn’t do his homework and decided that it would be a swell expenditure to run ads here and on Powerline” — but Barnett has been around the blogosphere (and was the Weekly Standard’s go-to guy on the leftosphere) long enough to know who Daou is, and to recognize that Daou would know exactly what to find at Power Line.
To this I will add just one more thing. On Tuesday, veteran Democratic operative and now Clinton spokesman Phil Singer told Hotline’s Blogometer:
We’re on some conservative sites because we’re not ceding any territory. We take nothing for granted.
To me this sounds a lot like the fighting spirit bloggers hold dearly — taking the fight to the other side’s camp. But that isn’t Sen. Clinton’s reputation with the netroots.
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Now to Marsh’s complaint. Her site is currently worth 42,806 views per week, just below the point where buys were near-automatic. She and Daou disagree on whether or not the campaign attempted to buy on her site, but as I do not have sufficient evidence to make a judgment, I’ll stay out of that question. Rather, let’s look at the circumstances:
As I dug through Blogads earlier this week, I found that liberal blogs with considerably more readers than Marsh were also not included in the initial ad buy: Juan Cole, Sadly, No!, BartCop, This Modern World, After Downing Street and Burnt Orange Report among them. They did not complain, but when the ad focus shifted on Thursday night, some of them were brought into the fold. Now they’re even on the low-traffic personal blog of Matthew Gross, who happens to be John Edwards’ blog adviser. And, yes, Taylor Marsh.
Other blogs that arguably reach the same demographic but were excluded include TV Newser, not to mention some of Clinton’s constituents, Curbed and Gothamist. The latter snub is somewhat notable considering she did buy on Gothamist’s DC affiliate, DCist. Heck, why not buy on Cute Overload? That site reaches a lot of people, and certainly fits with her warm and fuzzy approach. Same goes for Treehugger. It’s these lifestyle blogs that seem to lie beyond the campaign’s purview, while the campaign is “rotating,” as Daou put it, ads throughout Advertise Liberally Blogad network. [Update: Charles Kuffner has a point.]
Additionally, Some of Marsh’s complaints are confusing to me. She wrote, for example:
Single proprietor bloggers may not get the traffic of the gigantic community blogs, but we do a lion share of the work out here as well. … Taking me out of the equation for a moment, shouldn’t Clinton at least help out a few of the small female only blogs, reaching out to females everywhere? You’d think that would be important to her.
Yet Feministing and Pam’s House Blend are just the kind of female-only blogs Marsh describes, and they were included. In fact, Pam’s House Blend along with female-led Firedoglake were among the few sites to pick up Premium ad buys. Similar complaints likewise were off-target. At MyDD, Texas Nate hit Clinton’s camp for not buying on a few specific regional blogs. One was Bleeding Iowa which, so far as I can tell, does not support Blogads.
And to editorialize for a moment, there is something unseemly about complaining that an advertiser did not buy ads on one’s site. Daou and the Clinton team are under no obligation to buy ads on anybody’s site. Yes, Marsh is a member of the netroots in good standing — she has worked for the SEIU and MyDD to cover a labor dispute in Las Vegas — but the same is true of dozens of other bloggers whom Clinton missed on the first round. As Daou said to me, it’s impossible to buy on every site. And at least as of this morning, Marsh has made no acknowledgment of her inclusion in the next phase of the Clinton ad buy.
If it’s not exactly extortion, it does betray the kind of myopic egocentrism that establishment Democrats use — sometimes as an excuse, sometimes not — to keep the netroots at bay.
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It was probably inevitable that there would be pushback when Hillary Clinton sought to engage the blogosphere. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the netroots’ legitimate policy disagreements with her have led to reflexive negative reactions to virtually anything she does.
Here is an example, taken from MyDD this week: In a post titled “Playing the Electability Card,” Chris Bowers interprets a memo by Clinton pollster Mark Penn (as summarized by Newsday) — comparing his candidate favorably to her rivals — as playing the “electability card,” thereby denigrating the Democratic party as a whole and reinforcing Republican stereotypes. Problem is, there’s no Penn quote that clearly says this; the more plausible interpretation is that Hillary has more experience standing up to the kind of GOP attacks Bowers fears could be effective. Most perplexingly, the only Democrat whose “electability” is questioned in the Newsday article is Hillary — and in the second paragraph, no less. Although Penn’s claim that other campaigns are “stalled or falling” is dubious, there’s nothing scandalous about him putting Hillary Clinton in the best possible light. That is his job, after all.
Hillary Clinton’s longstanding position on the Iraq war puts her squarely at odds with the netroots, whose creation and cohesion owes more to the Iraq invasion and subsequent deterioration than any other issue. Short of a full apology, there’s nothing she can do. Even then, Edwards did that a long time ago, and Obama never supported it in the first place (though he never had to actually cast a vote on it).
Clinton’s online campaign must be one largely of damage control — managing expectations and placating bloggers who long ago made up their mind against her. Yet while Marsh and others (such as radio talker Ed Schultz) complain that she is not reaching out to progressives, through the webcast, blogads and forthcoming guest blogs, that’s exactly what she’s trying to do. Whether Clinton can soften the netroots opposition to her is an open question, but considering the uphill battle, it was probably wise to get started on it first thing.
