On Not Crossing Bright Red Lines

by Patrick Ruffini :: February 2nd, 2007 10:41 pm

A couple of days ago I was talking to a prominent conservative blogger in Washington. We were talking about any guilt-by-association issues caused by campaigns hiring bloggers. I tended to think these were a thing of the past; reporters have better things to do than to stalk through months-old archives for slightly off-key quotes made prior to a blogger joining a campaign.

No less than 24 hours later, I get to eat my words.

I do think the case of John Edwards official blogger Amanda Marcotte is the exception that proves the rule, however. Here’s what she wrote, now down the memory hole:

Naturally, my flight out of Atlanta has been delayed. Let’s hope it takes off when they say it will so I don’t miss my connecting flight home.

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good f****** god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and f***** her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

That’s the kind of raw, profanity-laced screed you’re more apt to find in the diaries at Daily Kos than you are from a Presidential campaign blogger. Pandagon especially has been been known for this stuff for a long time.

I think it’s perfectly fine for a blogger to sound some discordant notes and then be hired by a campaign. That’s not what this is about. Had Amanda Marcotte written a bad thing or two about John Edwards a couple of months ago, this wouldn’t have been a story.

It’s crossing Bright Red Lines that’s the problem. It’s the profanity. It’s losing control of your logical faculties. How do we know when someone crosses a Bright Red Line? We know it when we see it. We knew it when Kos totally lost control and said “screw them.” It’s the juicy stuff. Kos can call for defeat in Iraq all he wants and people won’t call him on it because they’ve been desensitized to it. It’s things said in bad taste that get you in trouble — the same kinds of things that would cause the room to go silent if you were to say them at a party.

And this is not the oppressive standards of campaign world crashing down and ruining the blogosphere. If you’re going on a job interview, it’s a good bet that your prospective boss is going to Google you, troll your Facebook and MySpace profiles, wade through your Flickr album. Stuff like this doesn’t help, whether you’re going out for a job on a campaign or at the local bank.

Tagged: amanda marcotte blogosphere john edwards strategy

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