Bloggers on the Bus

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Edwards and Marcotte, however, may have tarnished the credibility that they both covet. After right-wing bloggers began targeting her, Marcotte announced that she had deleted her most controversial Duke comments. The deletion garnered critics on both the left and right who said she was pandering to Edwards, a former Senator from North Carolina, where Duke is located and where he has based his campaign. The Edwards campaign and its supporters made matters worse by claiming that a technical glitch, not Marcotte, had brought the controversial posts down. And Marcotte referred all interview requests to her new bosses, who declined to let the once prolific talker speak for herself.

Marcotte's pre-Edwards blogging oeuvre may have been provocative and profanity-laced, but it was still not far from the mainstream of the blood sport that is political blogging. And there is a welcome wonkishness to Marcotte, who, unlike some star bloggers, is not afraid to parse policy with her readers. Those qualities helped earn Pandagon, which will continue in the care of other bloggers while she's gone, a dedicated and sizable fan base. Marcotte has made it clear to her fans that working for a campaign requires a change in tone. "I know how the game works," she wrote in a recent post. "I'm more interested in helping my candidate win than anything—luckily we see eye to eye on most issues."

Edwards is not the first candidate to discover the potential pitfalls of putting bloggers to use. McCain's campaign was excoriated for using one as a propagandist when conservative blogger Patrick Hynes admitted last summer he was surreptitiously paid by the candidate while he was writing critical posts about McCain's Republican rival Romney (Hynes is now officially and publicly on the McCain payroll). In 2004, John Thune, the Republican candidate for Senate in South Dakota, paid bloggers to attack supporters of his opponent, then Senate minority leader Tom Daschle. Clinton's big blog hire for this campaign, the well-known Peter Daou, has caused a kerfuffle of his own by buying advertisements on blogs around the country, including conservative sites, drawing criticism from liberal pundits and from bloggers whose sites were left out of the ad buy.

Daou and Hynes have bounced back, but Marcotte may not be so lucky. If Edwards has got cold feet, Marcotte could be out of a job. Even if she survives, though, her supporters have made it clear that they have their own agenda. When she announced that she was moving to the Edwards campaign, hundreds of supporters wrote in to Pandagon to congratulate her. Buried in the pile of warm wishes, however, was a warning of sorts: "Congratulations," wrote a user named MAJeff, "and best of luck. Well, best of luck until we've decided you and your candidate are not pure enough for us and we all turn on you."

The original version of this story incorrectly stated that in 2005, John Thune, a Democratic candidate for Senate in South Dakota, paid bloggers to attack supporters of his opponent, then Senate majority leader Tom Daschle and that a Campaign 2008 straw poll organized by liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas is conducted daily. Thune, a Republican, unseated then-Senate minority leader Tom Daschle in 2004 and Moulitsas' poll is conducted monthly.

The story also mistakenly noted that six days after writing a provocative post about the Duke University sexual assault case Amanda Marcotte announced she was leaving Pandagon to join the John Edwards campaign. In fact, she made her announcement nine days after writing the Duke post.