Blog P.I.

Amanda Marcotte’s account of her short stint on the Edwards campaign is up at Salon, and a good read.

“Reasonable people,” I thought, “can tell the difference between a personal blog post and those I’ll write for the campaign.” What I naively failed to understand was that there is no relationship between what reasonable people think and what will be used in a partisan bout of mud-slinging.

This, by the way, from someone who watched a goofy burger-themed parody of “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” last year and was moved to write this marvellously overwrought thing. Overall reaction to the Salon piece splits fairly predictably, with some of the choicest parting shots coming from those who have previously been on the receiving end of Marcotte’s legendary reasonableness.

There has been widespread bipartisan blogger sentiment that the Marcotte-McEwan scandal was blown wildly out of proportion, largely because there is also widespread bipartisan blogger sentiment that Bill Donohue is a ludicrous person to whom no political campaign should be paying attention. After minimal exposure to Bill Donohue, it is hard not to sympathize with this to some extent. On the other hand, what credible presidential campaign allows itself to be so successfully mau-maued by his Catholic League of America? (Well, Kerry-Edwards ‘04, for one.)

Moreover, as Bill previously asked, what the hell were Edwards’ people thinking when they hired Marcotte, anyway? Assuming they gave her blog at least a cursory inspection before making the offer, this cannot possibly have come as a surprise to them: the reasons she’s unemployable as a campaign staffer are the same reasons she’s popular and successful as a rabble-rousing blogger. (Then again, if a relatively large constituency on the internet translated proportionately to the real world, then Ron Paul would be a viable presidential candidate.) If any leftish bloggers are still surprised at the feeding frenzy that took place, imagine Michelle Malkin being hired as the online face of the McCain campaign and then claiming that “In Defense of Internment” wasn’t a big deal.

Hopefully, it’s not all bad news for Marcotte: her blogosphere Q rating — in both of the crucial love-her and love-to-hate-her categories — is higher than it was a month ago, and this will presumably open some other doors (as foreshadowed by Michael Bérubé here). She doesn’t have much of a shot at a career in mainstream politics, but that was never really in the cards in the first place.

And sometimes, amidst all the partisan mud-slinging, it’s hard to tell who the reasonable people are anymore.