No thanks to work and other obligations, I didn’t find a chance last week to weigh in on the controversy surrounding John Edwards’ hire of blogger Amanda Marcotte — including, but not limited to: the Bill Donohue hypocrisy angle, the Pat Hynes equivalency angle, the progressive Catholic angle and the netroots overreaction angle, among others. I may still assemble the notes I have, but I’ll have to check the sell-by date first.
But I do have a small opening to comment because, as the political blogosphere by now knows well, last night Marcotte resigned her position with Edwards ‘08, citing her continued employment as a potential liability for the rest of the campaign.
As my headline asks: What about Matt Gross, Edwards’ Senior Advisor for Online Communications/Chief Internet Strategist/general adviser on all things bloggy? Will he resign, too?
Consider John Dickerson’s report in Slate last week, which gave some insight as to how things went down at Edwards HQ:
The senator read some of the offending postings. He asked to talk to the bloggers, whose work he’d not read before and whom he’d never met.
I can certainly believe that Edwards had not read Pandagon (or Shakespeare’s Sister, whence he hired the somewhat less-controversial Melissa McEwan) but I cannot believe that Matt Gross has not. If there was one person on the campaign whose job it was to vet potential blog hires, it was Gross. And it’s not like he just missed a stray posting where Marcotte went a little too far — her quick temper and salty word choices are a big part of what’s made her so popular.
Gross certainly knows this, but from what I can tell, it did not occur to him that her incendiary rhetoric could pose a problem. As a veteran of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, Gross of all people should be familiar with the public relations problem off-message bloggers can present. Even Ezra Klein, one of the co-founders of Pandagon, seemed to second-guess the decision at his own blog last week:
Look: I thought the Edwards’ campaign made a surprising choice when it picked up Amanda. She throws elbows, to say the least. And her focuses, and opinions, are not always popular in contemporary American political life. It seemed an act of bravery and conviction, though I wasn’t sure what, exactly, the upside was. … I don’t envy them the controversy. But they made their own hiring decisions.
Now, Dickerson didn’t mention Gross or his position with the campaign. Actually, I can’t find any blogger from the past week mentioning Gross’ involvement in the fiasco. This surprises me, and I find it curious Edwards put himself out there to settle the issue last week. Had Edwards decided to fire them then and there, I believe then he would have had to issue a personal statement, in order to show the netroots that he personally was not rebuking them. But given their decision, there’s no reason Gross couldn’t have handled that — and kept his boss above the fray.
I don’t know Matt Gross and I wish him no ill will. Until the Marcotte hire, I thought the Edwards online campaign was head and shoulders above any other (so far), and the most savvy since, well, the one he helped run for Howard Dean. All of the technological things that made the Edwards’ online campaign great are just as they were two weeks ago — but in online politics, technology is secondary to community. And that’s where Edwards’ problem lies.
P.S. And now, McEwan has followed suit. I hesitate to make any quick pronouncements, except that I should emphasize I never found her comments as objectionable as Marcotte’s. I agree with Rick Esenberg’s argument that the real issue with Marcotte was
that one cannot help but conclude that she hates - really hates - these people
whereas the general thrust of McEwan’s controversial post struck me as agreeably libertarian (although I can’t defend the use of “Christofascist” (and it wasn’t the only time she used it)).
I don’t think this episode has to do material damage to the Edwards campaign. Who really cares what bloggers do, especially this early in the campaign? On the other hand, bloggers are not inconsequential, and this does say something about the inner workings of the Edwards camp.
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