As McCormack notes below, our esteemed once-and-future colleague Michael Goldfarb has now officially brought his pugnaciously eloquent (or eloquently pugnacious) blogging style to the McCain campaign. I’m going to give you a couple of snippets from his initial post to make a larger point:
A few minutes later, a post titled, “McCain: Obama’s Positions are So Changey” headlined the blog. Do you recognize what’s going on here? I bet you do. The McCain campaign is going to publish a blog that souds a lot like the kind of blogs that people actually read. This is unprecedented stuff. I bet there’s a decent chance that you’re like me in that you read a fair amount of blogs but never bother to read campaign blogs. And with good reason – the typical campaign blog consists of scintillating posts that read in their entirety, “John Q. Candidate really impressed 34 diners at a Poughkeepsie eatery this morning!” In other words, the garden variety campaign blog consists solely of Pravda-style propaganda, but with none of Pravda’s wit and charm. Or to put it another way, people don’t read campaign blogs for an excellent reason – they suck. But that may be about to change. At the McCain Report, Goldfarb included not one but two self-deprecating (or rather campaign-deprecating) remarks in his opening post. The gratuitous “my friends” playfully mocked the candidate’s most pronounced rhetorical tic, and the mention of the hideous green backdrop that marred McCain’s speech this week made it happily unnecessary for me to post my own thoughts on the matter. I know this stuff may seem like no big deal, but it’s actually rather significant. By entering the blogging medium and playing by the pre-existing rules of the game, the McCain campaign is doing something revolutionary. By developing a blog that people will read, the McCain campaign will be able to actively participate in the ground floor conversations where media narratives are formed. The McCain presidential campaign is the first one to even attempt something so audacious yet also so obvious. The closest parallel would be the Edwards campaign hiring of Amanda Marcotte, but by her own telling the Edwards people were going to neuter her…um…colorful style (metaphorically only, of course) and reduce her to doing posts about the candidate shaking 12 hands at a Dubuque church social. So even the Edwards campaign, in spite of its strangely ballsy hire, balked at the idea of really using the blogging medium. A lot of entities have discovered that blogging, namely responding to events in real time with insight and verve, can color a lengthy news cycle. What Tom Maguire writes on a Monday sometimes becomes conventional wisdom by Friday, and such a thing would never happen if Maguire didn’t blog and instead stuck to his normal routine of eating Cheetos and watching endless loops of Project Runway. Campaigns are by nature cautious creatures, and that’s the main reason they’ve shied away from real blogging. After all, bloggers can frequently embarrass themselves with their impulsive enthusiasm. Or their moronic sadism. Just yesterday, the king of the blogosphere Markos Moulitsas did a post disparaging John McCain’s war-damaged teeth that even some of his own commenters took umbrage at. So having a real campaign blog isn’t without risks. But who’s kidding who? It’s not exactly like Moulitsas is the gold standard when it comes to showing solid blogging judgment. The McCain campaign is showing some real progressive judgment here. It’s such a savvy decision, it’s almost enough to make me forget about that execrable green backdrop.
