On Attribution

Four examples, all three major candidates:

• Edwards campaign hires Amanda Marcotte to join the staff as blogger.  The campaign is forced to disavow her prior "offensive" blog posts but keeps her on staff.  Days later, Marcotte opts to resign after posting a "controversial" movie review on her personal blog.
• Clinton campaign attacked because her chief adviser, Mark Penn, profits from union-busting in the company he runs.  Penn has decided to recuse himself from such work.
• Edwards hires David "Mudcat" Saunders to advise the campaign on rural issues.  Saunders says stupid stuff on Time's blog.  Edwards spokesperson: "That's just Mudcat being Mudcat. He speaks for himself."
• Bob Bauer, general counsel for the Obama campaign (i.e., campaign finance and election law advice), offered his thoughts on a Libby pardon today.  As a result, Obama gets attacked, and is forced to repudiate Bauer's views.

The unifying theme between all four instances (and, no doubt, there's more**), is that campaigns are being attacked for things said or done by people they've paid, all of them in cases where they were not acting on the campaign's behalf but in a personal capacity.  As TAPPED's Garance Franke-Ruta put it in re Saunders:

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.

There are lines one could plausibly draw between those who serve on a campaign's staff exclusively and those outsiders who consult with that campaign and others simultaneously, or between speech and actions which are germane to one's campaign responsibilities and those which are not.  But if these lines do exist, they don't seem to be obeyed these days -- everything that anyone connected with a campaign (in any way) does, says or writes is being attributed back to the campaign, and campaigns will continue to be be called upon to disavow, and there may be calls for more people's heads, etc.

This is a new world in which we're living, where folks associated with campaigns can self-publish to the world, and are not only heard from when the media quotes them on a matter relevant to the campaign work.  We still have the power to shape these rules, and allow folks associated with campaigns to have some ability to speak on their own behalf, or to decide that they're always "on the clock" when it comes to anything they say publicly.   Up to you.

** Yup.  Totally forgot about the Obama/"1984" video and a few other examples.