The saga begins with the AP story from last Wednesday, about Elizabeth Edwards’ feud (if it wasn’t one already, it was about to be) with Monty Johnson, a neighbor in Raleigh, North Carolina. Said by Mrs. Edwards to be a “rabid, rabid Republican” (albeit one with a “Go Rudy Giuliani 2008″ sign in his yard, so how much of an extremist could he really be?), Mr. Johnson had once “brought out a gun while chasing workers investigating a right of way near his property,” and maintains a “slummy” lot, to which Johnson replied, “I have to budget. I have to live within my means.”

If nothing else, it was an off-message moment for John Edwards’ campaign and for Elizabeth (or as we like to call her, EE) as well.

Hall noticed the story and posted an excerpt, “wondering” why the leftosphere hadn’t noticed this. On which post, of all people, EE (or someone purporting to be her) left a comment advancing her side of the story:

I don’t hate him. I don’t know him. He is not my neighbor. He invests in property near ours, which, I understand, is under contract for above $1.5M. He owns at least 15 different pieces of property … When workers were hooking up power in the area, the Duke Power folks complained that he had threatened them with a gun when they were in the power easement right-of-way at the street in front of his property … The Rudy sign is fine: it gives us a way to tell people where to turn.

Hall welcomed her to the site and asked for confirmation that she really said of Johnson, “I wouldn’t be nice to him, anyway.” The following morning, EE responded once more:

I would always be nice to someone. (I am a Southerner; we are nice to everyone and particularly nice to those with whom we disagree. And North Carolina is a pretty divided state politically, so we all get a lot of chances to practice that.) He had previously said I wasn’t nice to him. As far as I know, I have never laid eyes on him.

To which another commenter asked:

Ah, but Mrs. Edwards, the question was…Is the above quote accurate?

EE didn’t return, and as of Friday afternoon, that was that. Until yesterday, that is, when the same post received a comment from one Ronda Johnson, claiming to be the daughter of old man Johnson:

Thank you to Mrs. Edwards for her investigative reporting, but she is completely incorrect! It is actually quite scary to myself and the rest of my family that she has went so far as to investigate my father, Monty Johnson! Unfortunately, she is not up to date or accurate at all ! Again, the property on Ivey road sold several years ago in order to keep his current proprty across the street from her where he has lived since his grand daughter was born 9 years ago! He has never owned proprty on Union Grove Church Road, though his son does in his son’s name! The rest of the lot’s and acreage are located right across the street from her and mostly filled with mobile homes! As far as the incident that occurred with Duke Power, Monty was not in town and the sherriff was called and Duke Power made to leave because they were in the wrong! I know because the incident occurred with me! As for her being friendly, well I never seen that! I was volunteer coordinator for Emma,s class last year and couldn’t even get money for a pack of pansies donated by them or for any other project we asked for help or money on! I never even got a phone call returned! John attended 1 party for the teachers birthday and sat directly across from me and never spoke! Though he did maintain a smile the entire time, even while eating! I must say that the silky pony will be the prettiest president we’ve ever had, should he succeed! Elizabeth hasn’t been rich long enough to have rich friends and too long to have poor friends, so I guess the lonely sole will just investigate and pick on her neighbors!

There’s something curious about the fact that every single one of Ms. Johnson’s sentences ends with an exclamation point! It doesn’t exactly come across as a sign of sincerity! Nor does the “silky pony” reference! But you never know, maybe Ronda Johnson reads blogs! After all, Elizabeth Edwards does!

Plus, there is a Ronda Johnson listed (Google her name, or call their new 411 service) as living in Raleigh. Same h-less spelling, too. Hall tried calling it, but couldn’t get an answer.

Hall had also matched EE’s e-mail address to other plausible EE registrations, such as one at My Left Wing. The address (Hall says the account is bouncing now) is probablyElizabeth at johnedwards.com, perhaps mischievously, suggesting the user knew other blog readers would question its provenance. Plus, being a minor scholar of EE’s blogospheric participaticipation, I’d say it certainly sounds like her.

As Hall graciously notes in his wrap-up post, he contacted me and I lived up to the name of this blog by matching the IP addresses to the possible commenters’ probable locations. As he puts it:

1) The IP address for Ronda Johnson resolves to the correct geographical area, and the comment left here matches up nicely with a comment Ronda Johnson left at Bill Quick’s site on April 12th, when this story was breaking. I can’t imagine anyone running around the internet impersonating Mr. Johnson’s daughter, but there is always a possibility someone is doing so. Caveat emptor on this one.

2) The IP address for Elizabeth Edwards resolves to Orlando, FL, which isn’t consistent with Mrs. Edwards’ location. However, John Edwards was in Fort Myers, FL on April 15th (thanks again, William), so it’s entirely plausible that his wife could have been using an Orlando based dial-up ISP to leave those comments. Still, we can’t be sure, so Caveat emptor.

That sounds about right. Could be both, maybe even neither — but it’s probably at least one of them (EE), and someone who knows the other one (RJ). If all is as it seems, an AP story reporting some offhand comments fueled a lingering resentment between two neighboring families, subsequently breaking out into the comment section of an interested but uninvolved blogger.

Heck, they’re practically the Montagues and Capulets of the Research Triangle. Sort of not really. But just think of how it’ll play at the next PTA night.

Bonus observation! Fifteen years ago, there wasn’t a blogosphere to hash out neighborly disputes like this one. But they did have something arguably better.

Today we’ll update that, covering the time elapsed. We’ll start as we did before by comparing the top three contenders for both party. Although there has been relative movement among them, nobody new has clearly broken through or fallen out of each trio. Then we’ll get to the dark horses and mix things up a little.

Last time we started with the Dems, so let’s switch it up and begin with the GOPers:

McCain may not be the frontrunner any longer, but he apparently remains the most talked-about candidate. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what was happening with McCain during the spikes recorded here, so I went to Google BlogSearch, which lets you isolate search terms by date. The first spike was certainly nothing good — mostly posts about about his slipping support. The second spike coincided with his semi-unofficial announcement on the Letterman show, where comments ran a little better — but it also occasioned his slip of the tongue about lives “wasted” fighting in Iraq.

Being the new frontrunner, Giuliani only had two short-lived leads in early February and March. The first peak coincided with his statement of candidacy, and pales compared to McCain’s; the second appears to match up with the New York firefighters union — the Swiftboaters to Rudy’s Kerry? — releasing a letter opposing his bid. Otherwise, he seems to run consistently behind McCain and about even with Romney.

Romney’s first spike? His announcement at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. His second spike was the CPAC conference — which explains why Giuliani actually saw his highest absolute mark for the period here as well, and perhaps why McCain experienced another short peak — much of which was probably about his decision not to attend. Actually, that may have been for the better — because as we all remember, the whole event was overshadowed by Ann Coulter. So let’s make a brief detour and look at how Coulter stacks up for the period against the candidates she appeared with:

Yeah, that looks about right. How about the Dems?

When we last measured, all three candidates were just beginning to pick up serious attention, Hillary for her campaign launch and Obama for his exploratory announcement. But where Hillary was the slight leader last time, now she is clearly underperforming relative to her name ID. The huge spike for Obama centered around the weekend of Feb. 10 and 11 represents his more-official kickoff and the launch of his newfangled campaign site, which drew a good deal of positive notice. He commanded plenty of attention in the weeks after, but lately appears to be no more or less interesting to bloggers than Hillary. This could be a sign that the initial rush of attention has subsided, and he’s just another candidate in contention.

Oh, and that peak they share a week and a half after Obama’s announcement? That’s the argle-bargle started by David Geffen’s anti-Hillary comments to Maureen Dowd.

The Edwards spikes require no Googling: The first was Ann Coulter’s aformentioned braindead attack, and the second was the announcement that Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer had returned. Both have clearly earned him a good deal of attention, making him arguably the most interesting candidate of the Democratic field right now. On the other hand, while that attention has been positive, both instances are predicated on bad news — not exactly sustainable, or something you would want to sustain, anyway.

Now, onto more arbitrary comparisons:

As long as reputable pollsters are putting Al Gore into the mix, who am I to say they’re wrong? Likewise with Bloomberg — as long as respectable newspapers are writing stories about the possibility of a self-funded bid, who am I to leave him out?

Now, Gore just picked up an Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth” (as if you didn’t know what that huge spike in late February was about). And Fred Thompson, well, perhaps he’s just entertaining himself right now (but at least he did appear on a Sunday show recently). For these reasons, and because Bloomberg has a mighty populous city to run, I decided to append the word “president” to each search, just to keep things on topic. It didn’t change much.

That appearance was March 11, but interest has sustained relatively well until surging last week for no reason I can divine from patterns at the Blogsearch — but I’m guessing it has something to do with the first round of polls showing him with some credible support.

Bloomberg is still waiting for his surge. He may be waiting awhile — that near-flatline does accurately represent the (lack of) interest in such a campaign. For mirror-opposite reasons the same is true of Gore: he is larger than life, and if he did run, it’s not implausible that he could — as his former boss was always said to do — suck all the oxygen out of the room.

So here we compare the relative leaders in online mentions among the Democrats, Republicans and dark horses. (Yes, overall Obama has run stronger than Edwards this period, but let’s go with Edwards, who is closer-watched/has had bigger spikes lately — even if he has fallen into third in just the past few days.)

Clearly Edwards cannot compete with Gore’s Oscar — apparently only Coulter can do that — but aside from that, he doesn’t run too far behind. And McCain is at least competitive. He doesn’t have those huge spikes, but he has led Edwards several times (and upon his Letterman announcement, even Gore, briefly).

So how about those underperforming frontrunners, and the next-most-popular dark horse? Well, Rudy is no match for Hillary. This does seem to show that while he leads the traditional polls and has appreciable support among bloggers, he is not really the “rightroots” candidate — Thompson has been doing almost as well since his announcement. Their mentions rise and fall together enough to be worth mentioning, suggesting that the two are being compared against each other. Hillary’s mentions, however appear to be completely unrelated, and that makes sense as well. Even at their best, neither Giuliani nor Thompson have bested Hillary in blogger mentions this period.

Once again, we’re just measuring mindshare, and with the exception of Bloomberg, all of the candidates here have demonstrated the ability to capture it. So who knows whether it’s good to be a leader in these charts or not. Maybe that’s another study, for another time. For this time, we’ll leave it right here.

The last few weeks have not been good ones for the Edwards campaign, with professional blowhard Bill Donohue shouting the unfortunate comments of short-lived Edwardsville blogress Amanda Marcotte into the New York Times and Washington Post — and Marcotte herself prolonging the story in Salon and the Austin Chronicle. Nor were they helped when Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise filed her own Salon column confirming Elizabeth Edwards’ involvement in blog strategy and claiming she had warned Edwards staffers of how a netroots hire could go wrong.

One reason the incident has been so bad for the Edwards campaign is that it turned an asset — his widespread support among liberal bloggers — into a liability. While few among the netroots actually abandoned him, it exposed the possibility that a wedge could be driven between them — and his campaign hasn’t regained its footing since.

Until now, that is, and John Edwards has none other than Ann Coulter parody Ann Coulter to thank as the leftosphere is working overtime this weekend to turn this year’s CPAC — where Coulter referred to Edwards as a “faggot” — into the political equivalent of this year’s NBA All-Star weekend in Las Vegas (Pacman Jones or no). Call it a reverse Perlstein: the leftosphere always liked Edwards. Now they finally have a reason to rally around him again.

The incident won’t necessarily help him with Beltway handicappers who fault the campaign’s decision-making, although they should be reassured that Edwards quickly released an e-mail letter from campaign chairman David Bonior, pictured below, and worked it into a fundraising pitch, asking for “Coulter Cash”:

Note that they are making the video available on their own site — this is to their credit, as traditional campaign wisdom holds that you don’t want to keep a negative story going. But this attack was so meanspirited and witless and obviously saying far more about Coulter than Edwards that there is virtually no downside.

The rightosphere can denounce her all they like — calling her a “verbal suicide bomber” and likening her to David Duke and Michael Moore — but they can’t make up for the YouTube-ready audience laughter and applause that greeted Coulter’s remarks.

For the same reason, Howard Dean’s call for the GOP frontrunners to denounce Coulter’s remarks was pretty smart, too. He got his presidential denunciations on short order, but some conservatives refocused their ire on him and effectively defended Coulter. Liberal bloggers may have painted a picture of the conservative blogosphere as a mere appendage of the right-wing establishment, but there’s no way Glenn Greenwald will let Ed Morrissey speak for the movement on this one.

Only CPAC can do that now. Will the conference organizers announce that Ann Coulter will not be invited next year? Her post-9/11 “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” column got her axed from NRO, so they would even have the cover of precedent. Or are they too fearful losing Coulter’s College Republican fan base?

P.S. What do we make of the fact that PoliPundit blogger and Duncan Hunter campaign paid staffer Michael Illions is one of the few conservative bloggers publicly standing by her, while this same week the Hunter campaign cut loose two South Carolina operatives for making bigoted statements? Just asking.

P.P.S. Beyerstein got at least one thing wrong in her Salon column — Matt Stoller, whom she cited twice as a better potential hire than herself or Marcotte, missed the boat entirely as this was breaking last night:

I called a contact at the Edwards campaign for a response. Nothing yet. It would be stupid to respond to Coulter, but it’s a good idea to hang Coulter around Romney and Giuliani’s neck.

Right. Certainly nothing you’d want to use to solicit campaign contributions…

But as the headline above has already given away, we may have blogged too soon — after all, there is someone else at the campaign who is a longtime member of the blogosphere, and it is someone who wields much more power than Gross.

It’s Elizabeth Edwards.

We certainly don’t know for a fact that EE (as we’ll refer to her from here on) recommended Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan for the jobs of blogmaster and blog wrangler (respectively) but we can demonstrate that she would have been in a position to know about them and to make such recommendations. And if it ever did come out that EE was responsible for this mess, it would renew questions about how much control she has over John Edwards’ campaign — and whether it hurts more than it helps.

So let’s get demonstrating:

Going back to at least the 2004 campaign, EE has not just been a mere reader of the blogs but also a commenter at some of the biggest sites on the left.

In April 2005 she took to task several members of the Democratic Underground community for making fun of right-wing radio talker Laura Ingraham’s breast cancer — EE is a breast cancer survivor herself — earning thumbs up from Michelle Malkin and others in the rightosphere.

She may have only commented at Daily Kos eight times from 2004 to 2005, but she was nevertheless one of the earliest to sign up: going by the sequential user ID numbers, EE was the 3,454th person to register; the site now has well over 100,000 registered accounts (not the same as active users).

Now, how much involvement does she actually have with blogs? Last year she told Campus Progress:

I spend a lot of time on the internet. I get a lot of information from blogs, I have a whole list including Talking Points [Memo], Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and more. Sometimes I check out the right wing sites to see what they are talking about. I have a whole folder of sites and I open them all up every day and see what catches my eye. … Sometimes I would post on blogs not under my real name. … But I had to stop doing that after John started running. Now I sometimes participate under my own name. I participate in blogs and newsgroups – not just political ones but other issues too.

Make no mistake, EE knows a lot more about the blogosphere than the average consultant.

And we also know that while she holds no official position with the campaign, she has something of a reputation for usurping the paid consultants’ authority (or so goes the chatter). In December of last year, she appeared in the comments of Illinois-focused ArchPundit to defend herself against claims that she led the ouster of star consultant David Axelrod, who handled Edwards’ media in 2004 (but this time is advising Barack Obama). As ArchPundit’s Larry Handlin put it, during the previous campaign

her handling of consultants and staff was problematic because she tends to micromanage and many would say she cuts people out of the loop. That’s a management problem. It’s also what probably endears her to those who love her and so it’s a double edged sword.

If that’s the case here, then we owe an apology to Matt Gross. Obviously there is no smoking gun evidence that EE was the instigator of the blog hires, but she most certainly would have been in a position to advise (and even make decisions) on the matter. It’s also not unreasonable to think EE would be a more avid reader of pointedly feminist blogs than Gross (not to impugn his feminist credentials). At the very least, she didn’t step in and warn that Marcotte’s rhetoric might be a little too hot for her to serve in a communications role.

Without more information, we’ll file this one under “more than plausible.” But Blog P.I. is not the first to suggest that EE had more involvement here than has been reported. Take this bit from National Journal’s most recent Dem rankings — where Edwards is ranked number three, where he has been since Obama’s emergence:

The 24 hours that elapsed between the MSM’s Blogger-gate stories and Edwards’ nuanced response has become this cycle’s unexplained, awkward Jeanine Pirro gap. We’d blame this on consultants, except Edwards routinely brags he doesn’t listen to them. This one’s on him (or her?).

Commenters at Pandagon seem to think Elizabeth Edwards was behind the decision, too. And in a Feb. 8 diary at Daily Kos, New Hampshire-based MissLaura posted a recent (but pre-controversy) interview with EE on blogs, dKos and the campaign. As MissLaura suggested in that post:

Edwards returned several times to the question of how much control campaign staff would have over what she says publicly, focusing on her efforts to resist such control. However the behind-the-scenes debate over whether to fire or stand behind Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan played out days later, we have to assume that it was at least in part shaped by the presence of a powerful figure who understands blogs and who habitually works against excessive homogenizing.

Others, such as early Dean blogger Dan Conley, have predicted that her blog involvement could be a problem — although not quite like this:

There are two ways to view Mrs. Edwards’ posting on blogs. Some will wonder how wise it is for Edwards to enter this swamp. Every blogger has a sane/insane ratio for political posts … we come to accept it from our peers. But when an aspiring First Lady says something pointed, it’s not just typical Internet chatter, it’s potentially big news. Elizabeth Edwards is extremely smart and a terrific writer … but it’s an incredible high-wire act for someone so prominent to attempt.

Sure, it’s pretty neat that there’s a potential First Lady reading and writing on blogs (on her own, in her own words). It’s proof that whereas all the talk about the downfall of the MSM a couple years back proved false, the blogs certainly have delivered on some degree of democraticization of political media.

But let us observe, as if it even needs pointing out, this development has not always proved beneficial for politicians and political campaigns. No matter what, that’s been the case here. As my former colleague Marc Ambinder points out at Hotline On Call, the controversy

stepped on his health care rollout and has been the dominant theme of his campaign for a week.

Make that two weeks. The Edwards campaign did itself enough damage by waiting too long to decide what to do with their problematic bloggers, and the drawn-out hiring, firing, rehiring and resigning just made it worse. Not to mention, Marcotte’s blog-and-tell for Salon can only delay the Edwards camp from getting back on message. Alas, Edwards will not be on the Sunday shows this week.

Elizabeth Edwards may be the most powerful blog expert advising her husband’s campaign, but assuming this reasoning is on target, she also may not be expert enough.

Note: Additional links and analysis provided by Not Paul Begala.

Update: NPB adds a worthwhile clarification in the comments:

[Marcotte an McEwan] were not vetted and the communications staff was not prepared for the broadside against them. As a former communications guy myself, I can’t tell you how much incomplete information pisses us off. … It’s a legit question that Democrats should be asking of one of their own potential nominees: Why weren’t you ready for a hit job from the right?

Update, Wednesday: Thank you, everyone who commented. Thank you especially, everyone who commented on something other than “good people” and “hit job.” I have approved several comments that are redundant at best, and I will certainly approve others (even on this very post). However, please read through the comments before adding your own, and please only do so if it’s a unique thought. Bonus points if it’s actually about this post, and not the aforementioned comment.