Funk Babblings

I've mentioned a few times that I enjoy the writing of Amanda Marcotte (pandagon_amanda) at Pandagon (pandagon_net). She's an outspoken Texan feminist, liberal, music fan, atheist (yet leader and prophet of the Church of the Mouse and Disco Ball), heavily inspired in her writing by the late Molly Ivins.

A couple weeks ago she announced that she'd been hired as blogmistress for the John Edwards presidential campaign, and would (sadly) be reducing her Pandagon blogging in order to focus on this great new opportunity. She said she strongly supported his candidacy and his positions on the issues, and was looking forward to helping him win.

Then the knives came out. Some rivals (whether initially on the D or R side is unclear) saw an opportunity to knock down Edwards by attacking the past writings of his newest employee. The first thing they found was something she'd just written a little over a week earlier, regarding the Duke lacrosse team rape scandal. (Keep in mind that both Duke and John Edwards HQ are in North Carolina.) A longtime critic of the phenomenon of blaming powerless rape victims rather than their generally privileged attackers, she'd written a quick (and characteristically sarcastic) post in disgust about CNN's coverage: "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 fucked her against her will &emdash; 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."

After she joined the Edwards campaign, this earlier post on her own blog was deliberately misconstrued as being against the legal principle of "innocent until proven guilty", somehow proving that neither Amanda nor Edwards have a proper respect for the law. Her initial response was another post, contrasting the Duke situation with OJ Simpson's murder acquittal. But the uproar got to the point that she deleted/rewrote the original post, hoping to quell the controversy and get back to work on the issues of the campaign. This, of course, only gained her accusations of trying to whitewash her past.

Things got worse from there.

First conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, then someone named Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League (a group of about 350,000 ultraconservative Catholics), started talking to press outlets about the past writings of Amanda (especially here, universally taken out of context) and another feminist blogger Edwards had hired. They didn't like what the two bloggers had written in the past opposing the reach of religious conservatism and Catholic doctrine such as the opposition to contraception.

Now you'd think that the Edwards campaign would have done this back-research themselves before hiring a couple of bloggers who post their thoughts for all to see, and you'd think they'd have considered how to handle such a controversy were it to arise. Even the (doomed) rookie congressional campaign I was tangentially involved with a few years ago was able to figure that sort of thing out, but apparently the second John Edwards campaign for president didn't think to check the past blog entries of his new bloggers. So it took a few days for any sort of response to come out, and the first thing anyone heard was a Salon story passing on the rumor that both bloggers had been fired.

However, Salon was wrong, or maybe just missed the nuances. Last Thursday, Edwards posted a note saying that he found those old posts personally offensive, and they weren't how he expects the people who work for him to talk to people, but that he believes in giving everyone a fair shake. (Um, John, the posts were there to be read before you hired them. Just sayin'.) Oh yeah, and he doesn't want the great debate about the future of the country to be hijacked. (Bill Donahue responded with something arrogant along the lines of "we decide the conversation topic, not you.") Simultaneously, the two bloggers posted apologies on the Edwards site stating that their personal blogs are satirical and not intended to offend anyone. Obviously all these statements had been carefully worded and filtered through the campaign PR staff.

My reaction to this was mixed. It was obvious to me that (a) Edwards or his staff had not handled these two hirings very well in the first place, (b) Edwards and his staff are still trying to figure out how to handle the inevitable right-wing attacks, and (c) Amanda was being muzzled. At least they hadn't been fired, but there wasn't a very strong show of support, much less any fight back against an attacker who has a long history of his own brand of bigotry and intolerance.

So it was little surprise to me when I read Amanda's announcement today that she's resigned from the Edwards campaign. She said she had become a target that risked the Edwards campaign "every time [she] coughed", so she couldn't effectively do the job she was hired to do. And of course, being part of the campaign meant that she couldn't respond the the attacks herself, while being outside the campaign allows her to respond as only she can.

(Selfishly, I'm happy that I'll get to read the unfiltered Amanda again.)

This whole episode is relevant to all of us who live our lives partially online. If we're smart, we don't make public anything that we think could hurt us in our future careers, but it can sometimes be difficult to make that prediction. Maybe our future employers, like the Edwards campaign, will have no problem with (or awareness of) what we've written. But what about their rivals and competitors? Will some third party use our past personal writings to attack us and our employers?

As one blogger put it, "Blogger pelt season is now open."

This sort of thing will only get worse as more people put more of their lives online in various ways. Not just blogs, but other sorts of social networking sites, web forums, Flickr photos, all may make us vulnerable in some way we may not anticipate. Knowledge of this prompts many people to try to hide under varying levels of pseudonymity (complete anonymity online is nearly impossible without a lot of work), but a determined effort will eventually be able to break through that veil. Others of us just hope that being ourselves will be good enough, and that anyone who objects to that can be ignored; circumstances don't always play out that well though.

Luckily, most situations aren't nearly as cutthroat as political campaigns.

Updates:

1. Pandagon seems to be back up and running now.
2. Melissa McEwan, the other blogger involved in this controversy, has also resigned.
3. Neither Edwards nor the other candidates have distinguished themselves in this mess.
4. "We Are All Melissa and Amanda."
5. Amanda has written her side of the story, "Why I had to quit the Edwards campaign", over at Salon. (Linking to the article through Pandagon avoids having to watch an ad.)