As presidential campaigns go, most aides have historically been invisible and irrelevant. One might occasionally find a human-interest profile in a local paper about a hometown native getting a job with a big-time candidate, but the general rule has always been that behind-the-scenes types were of no real interest to the public, better yet to professional journalists.
That, obviously, has changed, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding John Edwards’ two bloggers this week. For better or worse, the story not only struck a chord, it also seems to have re-written the rules a bit. The “incident,” for lack of a better word, is still fresh, but there are a number of angles to the controversy worth considering in more detail.
For example, Jonathan Chait asks whether the story was a positive or negative development for the medium as it relates to campaigns and employment.
I’m sort of late to this story, but one thing struck me about the John Edwards blogger brouhaha. After Edwards appeared ready to fire bloggers whose writing had become a point of controversy, other bloggers threatened to oppose Edwards in the primary. Then when he relented, they celebrated it as a crucial moment for the legitimacy of bloggers in mainstream politics.
But will this open doors to bloggers being hired by campaigns? My guess is, just the opposite. What this episode demonstrated is that, if you’re a candidate, hiring a blogger may or may not win you the loyalty of that blogger’s friends. But firing that blogger will certainly bring their wrath down upon you. But campaigns, of course, fire staffers pretty often. So why would you hire somebody you can’t fire?
True? And if so, how do candidates balance this with the desire to hire bloggers as a way to help garner support (and credibility) from the broader blogging community?
For that matter, there’s also the frequently overlooked question of whether the incident adversely affects the still-largely-unorganized “religious left.”
As the flap over alleged anti-Catholic writings by two John Edwards campaign bloggers devolves into a shouting match between conservative religious voices and liberal bloggers, some members of the “religious left” say they feel – again – shoved to the margins of the Democratic Party.
“We’re completely invisible to this debate,” said Eduardo Penalver, a Cornell University law professor who writes for the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal. He said he was dissatisfied with the Edwards campaign’s response. “As a constituency, the Christian left isn’t taken all that seriously,” Penalver said.
Democrats — and Edwards in particular — have embraced the language of faith and the imperative of competing with Republicans for the support of religious voters. His wife, Elizabeth Edwards, even sits on the board of the leading organization of the religious left, Call to Renewal. But in private conversations and careful public statements today, religious Democrats said they felt sidelined by Edwards’ decision to stand by his aides.
“We have gone so far to rebuild that coalition [between Democrats and religious Christians] and something like this sets it back,” said Brian O’Dwyer, a New York lawyer and Irish-American leader who chairs the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council, a Democratic Party group. O’Dwyer said Edwards should have fired the bloggers. “It’s not only wrong morally — it’s stupid politically.”
The story still seems to have broader questions than answers. Have bloggers won a key victory, or will campaigns prefer to keep their distance moving forward? Has the story somehow affected Democrats and the progressive faith community? Is this controversy a soon-to-be-forgotten blip, or is it the kind of story that will linger, annoyingly, for months?