It probably won’t surprise many to learn that after being fired, then un-fired, Amanda Marcotte has now resigned from the Edwards campaign. It was probably the best thing she could have done under the circumstances, as her presence would have made him unelectable, and has already done tremendous damage to his candidacy as it is.
Of course, the reality is she never should have accepted Edwards’ offer, the offer never should have been made, and the fact either happened shows the extent to which they were both either living in an echo chamber or just totally failed to consider the consequences. It should have been obvious to all parties involved that her prior statements were going to cause enormous problems for the campaign. Ace has it about right: if you want to swear and write deliberately vicious, offensive things about people you disagree with, you’re certainly entitled to, but you shouldn’t expect that everyone is going to forgive and forget if you accept a very public position with a mainstream campaign. If you want that kind of career, you’d best keep a civil tongue… er, keyboard.
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The dumbest thing about the whole event is that it created exactly what a campaign should never want: a staffer with a public profile that you can’t fire for fear of making some interest group angry. Campaigns need to hire and fire folks on the drop of a hat, and the whole point of any staffer’s job is to keep the focus exclusively on the candidate. The minute you become the story is the minute you should lose you job. But these celebre’ hires are the worst of every world. They are an attempt to curry favor with a given constituency, but its just not worth it. Curry favor some other way.
Echo chamber is right.
I knew as soon as the story hit The O’Reilly Factor something had to change. O’Reilly simply wouldn’t have let it go. Even after the MSM long tired of it.
Nobody should be fooled here: she was fired. In that world, “resigning” is involuntary more often than not. It’s just a way to fire someone while keeping clean hands.
Someone else in the Edwards camp may be due to “resign” soon, too. If someone hinted that she was being fired, thus forcing the campaign to deny it and give time for a “resignation”, then that person dropped the ball. The proper way for this to be handled was always a “resignation” straight up, not the off-again-on-again route they took.
I can’t swear somebody bungled something here. The firing could’ve been all rumor mill, no source. But if someone in the Edwards campaign did speak out about the firing, then that someone doesn’t get it, and is a campaign liability.
If we see a mid-level “resignation” sometime in about a month or so, I’m betting it was someone who bungled this whole situation, and may potentially be more detrimental than Ms. Marcotte.
Vic Stein has it right. You simply do not hire anyone to work full time on an important political campaign who you know may have a high profile that could cause a problem.
Blogging for Pendagon is high profile. It is. It may be a low form of celebrity (sort of like writing for Dean’s World or any other moderately high-profile blog) but it’s celebrity.
I know perfectly well that I would be unhirable by any major political campaign, or if I was it would have to be in a very low-profile position–and that as soon as someone found out who didn’t like the candidate, I’d be out of there in a shot.
It doesn’t matter that I stand by my written work–I do–but I know anything I ever wrote can be carefully pruned and quoted out of context back at me. It’s happened to me many times. I also swear with abandon. You don’t hire someone like me for a position where I represent you to the public. Even in a low capacity like being campaign web writer.
Marcotte was probably hired because the Edwards people really don’t understand blogs, asked around and heard she worked for one of the more popular ones, and was well-liked, and that’s all they thought was important. Whoops.
Amanda, having not worked for a campaign or really thought about what that world is like, just sort of assumed the candidate should brazen it out for her.
Someone explained the facts of life and she resigned. Which she should have done in the first place.
Painful. But hopefully she and the Edwards people take it as an important learning experience and move on.
(I’ve always liked John Edwards by the way, and I don’t think this will destroy his campaign.)
I’m glad she’s gone. It does worry me that the the Edwards campaign would make such an obviously bad choice. How could anyone actually read her blog and think, “Wow! This stuff about the Virgin Mary and NASCAR is awesome! She’d be a great public relations asset!” It reflects poorly on Edwards ability to delegate responsibility.
Sigh. I guess it’s too much to expect today’s Presidential candidates to fire up Firefox and type in her URL themselves. Though, frankly, at this early in the game I don’t know what keeps them so busy.
Bryan, from my tiny exposure to campaigning on a smaller scale, I’m convinced that nothing is more scarce than the candidate’s time. (Well, maybe money; but if that’s scarce, you won’t have a campaign for long.) I don’t fault Mr. Edwards for not having read her blog. Somebody else failed him in researching, but it wasn’t his personal failure.
Anyone remember how fast the Kerry campaign dropped Joe Wilson and his “Restore Honesty†shtick when the Plame thing first broke?
That’s the way to handle stuff like this. That action actually brought Kerry back into consideration for my vote. OK, so maybe my consideration only lasted 15 minutes, but at least it was something…..
I still wonder if the Kerry folks knew some details that the rest of us mere mortals have yet to learn.
I’m sure you’re right Martin. A candidate can’t be responsible for every hiring decision. Neither can a President.
Dave,
is this true?
you don’t think this is pretty inside-baseball stuff? o’reilly may have hammered it, but how many potential edwards votes care what o’reilly has to say?
Someone else in the Edwards camp may be due to “resign” soon, too.
Given that I’ve heard whispers that it was Mrs. Edwards who was the moving force behind the hires, that might be a tad difficult for the Lesser Lesser John to pull off.
M. Scott, I hadn’t heard that. If it’s true, ouch.
I suspect it’s true. I spend a lot of time on lefty blogs (I enjoy the debate) and Elizabeth Edwards is a ubiquitous presence on the port side of the blogosphere.
What’s disturbing, though, is that it casts doubt on Dean’s thesis (i.e., that the Edwardses don’t really understand blogs.) Mrs. Edwards clearly knows the lay of the Netroots land. I’m still scratching my head over exactly how this was allowed to happen.
Maybe she knows it a little *too* well, in that she may have read Marcotte’s ravings and concluded that they weren’t that bad compared with what she’d seen elsewhere among the nutroots.
Yeah or maybe she didn’t zone in on everything.
You know, you can make anyone look worse than they by just nutpicking.
It’s not that hard to do to someone with a long electronic trail.
It may just be a moderately expensive lesson learned.
(I note once again: any candidate who hired me, I’d say, “Are you *sure*??? I know you like what I’ve written recently, but dude, sometimes I go potty-mouth and say nasty shit. Are you *sure??” But it would be easy for me to get starry-eyed and be afraid to say so. Especially if I were a little younger and a little more naive about politics.)
Yea, but I have never seen you be as unnecessarily vile, offensive and hateful as she was. Yea, you get pissed, but most of the time you have a point other than purely being controversial and spiteful because someone has a different point of view. Swearing is one thing… she is in a whole other catagory. If you can’t f&*king understnd that you godbag christofascist dog that is your problem. I’m going to go F&*k and F&*k and not have babies…
Oh, how about any democrat who is catholic or has faith… or any independent or liberal republicans of faith? (and believe it or not there IS a religious left). She is blaming this on Donahue and the Religious Right, but I’m sure that when Edwards saw that “Hey, there are religous people in my party… and they are not happy” it was the moment she was “gone”. The “Action Alerts” issued by the nutroots shows just how detrimental they are to the democratic party… the groupthink that goes on on sites like DKos and D.U. is enormus. They don’t even know how far from mainstream they are… yet the democrats need them, so they pander to them. THAT is a major reason I don’t vote Democrat anymore.
After the Kerry campaign’s failure to prepare for the accusations of the Swiftboat Vets (which they should have known were coming – Kerry playing up that he is a veteran, and the reactions that his early 1970′s stuff gained) Edwards should have realized that any skeleton in the closet would be used. And Ms. Marcotte was not properly vetted anyway. That is worrisome. By now he should know better, and he didn’t.
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