Blog P.I.

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.