Right-wing blog envy

Pejman Yousefzadeh looks for problems with candidate blogging and finds some, or so he says:

Consider Dean's weblog as well. The overwhelming majority of the entries are authored by campaign staffers who use the blog to announce future campaign events, discuss the state of the Dean campaign in how it is faring in the presidential horserace, and put forth stories about the latest Dean appearances, and campaign happenings. All of this is a clever use of the Web to keep Dean in the news, but it does nothing to provide a fresh perspective on issues that Dean believes to be important. It certainly doesn't help that Dean himself rarely blogs on his own site, and that campaign staffers have to take such a giant role in serving as Dean's voice on the blog. One cannot help but wonder whether this excessive reliance on campaign staffers to write his campaign weblog indicates that Dean is too much a creature of his handlers, without anything serious or unique to say to the people whose votes he seeks.


First of all, Pejman is mixing his memes. We all know which 2004 presidential candidate is too reliant on his handlers, and it isn't Dean. Here's a hint: he was the 2000 presidential candidate who was too reliant on his handlers.


The "creature of his handlers" bit is a shot in the dark, pulled out of thin air, backed by nothing and floated out there to implant doubt in the minds of readers.


As for Dean not blogging regularly, I ask: If you were running for President, driving around rural states in an RV, starting your day shaking hands in a diner and going from public event to public event until a debate or fundraising dinner clears out at 10 pm, when would you have the time to blog? Blogging is a spare-time activity: Unpaid, requiring a fair amount of research and daily maintainance. If Dean was blogging himself, you'd probably write him off as an also-ran because he has too much time on his hands.


The official Dean blog works because it is written by both the bigwigs and the little guys on the campaign, whose reason for blogging is to excite the grassroots network that meets up every month, but wants to keep abreast of the campaign in between. It gives readers the feeling that they are insiders, and adds the sort of transparency that Bush's CREEP website merely apes with a donor list, most of which you can get elsewhere anyway.

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