HIS NAME IS MUD. You know, I thought everyone realized this during the Amanda Marcotte flap, but since that's clearly not the case, perhaps the latest to-do over Steve Dave "Mudcat" Saunders's comments over at Time magazine's Swampland will drive the point home. People who are working for presidential candidates -- and this goes for all of them, and not just John Edwards -- are ill-served by engaging in anything but the most innocuous personal blogging efforts. They're likely to get their candidate in trouble if they speak freely but in a way that's off-message for the campaign, and then if they stop speaking freely to counter that, they come off looking like hacks or like they've been silenced. It can be a lose-lose proposition for the campaigns they're affiliated with. Blogging about personal life issues (children, mundane daily events) or just-the-facts-ma'am political analysis -- as per Jerome Armstrong, who somehow manages to uncontroversially combine blogging and consulting these days -- still seems to be possible, however. It's too bad that these dynamics exist, because it means a lot of the most interesting political practitioners can't also be parts of the public conversation except between election cycles, or can't blog in any but the most anodyne fashion. On the other hand, we used to live and function in a world where the idea that not everyone needs to be part of the public conversation to have an impact was considered the norm, with true power being a behind-the-scenes thing, so perhaps the loss to public discourse is not nearly so great after all. Certainly Saunders will be more useful to the Edwards campaign for the skills he's brought to winning Virginia Democrats in the past than as any kind of public spokesman. And he it's not like he doesn't have his work cut out for him in broadening Edwards' appeal to working-class and economically stressed rural voters, either; a USA Today/Gallup poll analysis found that Edwards draws more from the ranks of upper income voters than do the other candidates.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
