More than a week ago, during John Edwards' visit to Dartmouth College (an event I keep trying and failing to write about), I had the opportunity to talk with Elizabeth Edwards. Then, just when I had a version of this post ready to go, the controversy over the Edwards campaign bloggers broke out, and I thought I'd wait. Although she answered questions about Iraq and about her husband's work on unionization campaigns, some of which I'm putting in a diary so that it's available if you're interested, here I focus on the large part of our conversation that focused on self-presentation during a campaign, especially online. As Micah Sifry writes
Of all the figures on the national political scene, there is only one person who I think we can genuinely say is participating in the blogosphere, as opposed to just using it: Elizabeth Edwards.
Edwards returned several times to the question of how much control campaign staff would have over what she says publicly, focusing on her efforts to resist such control. However the behind-the-scenes debate over whether to fire or stand behind Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan played out days later, we have to assume that it was at least in part shaped by the presence of a powerful figure who understands blogs and who habitually works against excessive homogenizing.
Speaking of the filter imposed by campaign communication staff and other handlers, she says
There’s a process, they want to make certain everything is on message...They want to run it through this sieve and the sieve takes all the life out of it, all the life out, and it’s dreadful. So I don’t do it.
While Elizabeth Edwards certainly doesn't employ the same tone and rhetorical strategies as Amanda Marcotte does at Pandagon, through her the campaign was already accustomed to unedited blogging.
I don’t edit. I suppose I go back and do a little editing, but not the sort that you’d expect a handler to do: "oop, can’t say that, can’t say that." Because I think it’s important. First of all, that’s what the medium demands, in my view. But also, I think it’s important. And honestly, if people don’t like you, they don’t like you. But at least they don’t like me and not some concoction that I’ve created I think is supposed to appeal to people. That would be the worst, to be disliked and it wasn’t even you, it was something you’d dreamed up or some handler had dreamed up.
She is equally insistent that, although "John actually is not much of a typist" and dictates his responses to questions posed in his Daily Kos diaries, his answers to questions here are his own, not filtered through anyone else. Of which questions they end up answering, she said
You hate for there to be a hard question stuck in the middle and it looks like you avoided it. In fact, this is one of John’s things, he said "I want to find the hard questions to answer." He actually did something the other day and someone else had culled the questions and I got really mad, I said "you culled only the easy questions, you cannot do that in the future. You think this is not a sophisticated crowd? You are completely wrong - they know the easy questions from the hard questions. You cannot do that." It’s treating them with disrespect to do that, but he didn’t know that, he only had the questions he had been handed.
But the thing that maybe most made her seem like one of us, someone you'd run into on a thread at Daily Kos, was how she expressed exasperation at the need to refrain from responding to criticisms she felt were unfair.
There are some things you want to respond to. John Solomon did a piece in the Washington Post that was just, first of all he had been told things that he knew would undercut his story and he left them out. It was really aggravating, so I wanted to respond, but the question was, do you keep it alive by responding?
...
That’s really the only time I (edit myself). Not what I say or how I say it, but whether it makes sense to even try. Archpundit I thought it was worthwhile to respond, but in general, most of the attack stuff – in fact I think I even said in there, usually when I read stuff like this I just leave it alone. That doesn’t mean you don’t draft something because you’re really aggravated (laughing), but then – you probably do the same thing – don’t press send!
None of this is to say that there's no strategic thinking involved in her blog participation. Surely there is. We should want there to be, as part of the broader development of politicians and campaigns taking blogs seriously. As we've seen, there are likely to be dust-ups along the way. Having people central to campaigns who understand the netroots will be crucial to the continued forward movement of campaign-netroots relationships.
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