The blogger campaign

John Dickerson:

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All the presidential campaigns have been hustling to hire bloggers. Now they're learning what to do once they've got them. Bloggers helped Ned Lamont beat Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut. Still, he didn't know how to handle it when one of the activists involved in his campaign caricatured Lieberman in blackface. Lamont ended up running away. Edwards, this week, went silent. The senator read some of the offending postings. He asked to talk to the bloggers, whose work he'd not read before and whom he'd never met. His campaign had not formally processed their paperwork, so Edwards and his advisers talked about whether to end the relationship before it began. (A report that the two were fired was wrong, says spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri.) Bloggers heralded the decision to keep them; the Catholic League was outraged, and a top adviser to a rival campaign took a shot: "Apparently they're more afraid of the bloggers than they are the Catholics."

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It seems almost unnecessary to make the case that political bloggers matter to primary campaigns. Almost all major candidates have hired them. Those that haven't still court and assiduously track them. Last week, John McCain's campaign held a special conference call with bloggers to convince them that their candidate was the real conservative in the race. When Hillary Clinton announced she was running, her campaign boasted about its online activists, listing blogger rave reviews next to mainstream accolades from pundits at Time and ABC. The campaigns that don't treat bloggers right get penalized, as Joe Biden and Rudy Giuliani have been. Campaigns are desperately trying to bring supporters online—it makes fund raising easier and allows candidates to deliver their message directly to supporters, bypassing the press. But bringing supporters online means putting people who have never read blogs a click away from them. If you watched Barack Obama's or Hillary Clinton's announcements of their presidential candidacies online, you might start getting your campaign news online. At that point, you've ventured into the blogosphere's neighborhood.

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It is hard to make the case that bloggers are penalizing Giuliani since he is at or near the top of polls taken of conservative bloggers. At the rock bottom was Chuck Hagel who is near the top of the main stream media wish list for Republicans. Liberals are going to have more problems with bloggers because left wing bloggers are profane and insulting and intolerant of those who disagree with them. While conservative bloggers have a certain level of intolerance, they present their point of view in a more professional and less insulting manner.

I have been very supportive of Giuliani, but I am in no way associated with his campaign. I am sure he has bloggers with higher profiles who also back him without being associated. Several candidates have done out reach to the higher profile conservative bloggers and that may be the way they try to stay in touch with that element of their base, without picking up the baggage that Edwards did with his hires.

Oh, and I do agree that Edwards has pretty much written off the Catholic vote. Heck, they did not vote for him when he was on the ticket in 2004.