Bloggers on the Bus

Correction Appended: February 8, 2007

In just a few years of blogging, Amanda Marcotte, 29, has established herself as an outspoken voice of the left, filling her Pandagon blog with posts on everything from conservative "wingnuts" to Catholic "anti-choicers" and the cabal she simply calls BushCo. In late January, more ethics charges were heaped on the District Attorney in the Duke University sexual-assault case, and Marcotte attacked the news with her usual swagger and sarcasm: "Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?"

Nine days later, Marcotte announced that she was leaving Pandagon. The reason? She had joined the John Edwards campaign as blogmaster to manage and help write the official blog and advise the campaign on sharpening its Internet outreach. Within hours of her announcement, right-wing bloggers were giddily digging up her Duke posts. A few days after that, a prominent Catholic group demanded that Marcotte be fired, citing several Pandagon posts that savaged conservative Catholic stances.

The 2008 U.S. presidential race marks the arrival of the star blogger as the hot new campaign commodity, however controversial. Almost every major candidate, from Hillary Clinton to John McCain and Mitt Romney, has hired well-known Web voices to help the candidates tap into the vast fund-raising, organization and communication potential of the Internet. That group is potentially huge: a Pew study of blogs during August 2006 found 4.8 million people blogging, commenting or otherwise sharing political content online.

But bottling the lightning of blogger authenticity is not easy. Many blogosphere activists suspect anyone signing on with a campaign of selling out. And in the era of drum-tight message control, campaigns are not inclined to tolerate the independence bloggers need to maintain their credibility.

Getting the marriage between campaign and blogger right is probably more important for Edwards than for any other Democratic candidate. The former vice-presidential candidate is moving hard to the left to differentiate himself from Clinton and Obama ahead of next year's primary contests. The blogosphere, with its surfeit of Democratic base voters, is a natural target audience: almost a third of the estimated 5 million daily political blog readers identified themselves as strongly liberal in a George Washington University study published last October.

Before the Edwards campaign recruited Marcotte, it found another biting left-wing feminist voice in blogger Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister. He has given overall control of Internet strategy to Mathew Gross, the man who pioneered that job for Howard Dean in 2004. The efforts seemed at first to pay off: Edwards almost always wins the nonscientific but closely watched monthly straw poll organized by liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas. At the Democratic fund-raising site ActBlue, he has raised $765,000 so far, nearly three times as much as any other candidate on the website.

The least tangible, yet most important, asset that bloggers bring to a campaign is their credibility with their fans, which is earned over years and gives their endorsement of a candidate real weight. Joe Trippi, who as Dean's campaign manager in 2004 employed up to six bloggers, says that letting the bloggers operate freely while on the payroll is crucial: he remembers cringing as he read Moulitsas' criticisms of Dean even as the campaign kept writing $2,500 monthly retainer checks.