Amanda Marcotte whines on Salon

Amanda Marcotte whines on Salon News As one of the thousands, possibly millions, of bloggers out there holding forth on everything from cooking to politics, I'd always felt especially fortunate. I'd ascended from having a small, low-traffic blog to joining Jesse Taylor at the big-time liberal blog Pandagon to actually controlling Pandagon in the course of three years.

Maybe they will have you back, and you can continue spewing your anti Catholic and anti Religious thoughts.

Still, my good fortune amounted mostly to being good at what was still essentially my hobby, since I worked full time outside of my blog life. So it surprised me that my streak of luck would result in the John Edwards campaign calling and recruiting me for the position of campaign blogmaster. Of course, when I was informed that the general gist of the job played to my strengths of writing about progressive politics and building a blog audience, then the recruitment made much more sense.

So you realized it was the strength of your writing about progressive politics that caused him to seek you out. Then why was it such a surprise that people questioned whether he supported the things you had written that got his attention?

I was also heartened to find out that Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister would be joining part time as a consultant, tapping her talents at organizing bloggers.... My main concern about the relationship between my personal blog and the campaign blog was that I wouldn't have enough time to keep my personal blog updated as frequently as the readers had come to expect, a problem I solved by inviting other bloggers to join. I thought some about content concerns, but my opinion had always been that bloggers who work for campaigns should feel free to have personal blogs, so long as they disclosed their employment to their personal blog readers and refrained from using their personal blogs to bash other candidates.

I don't know whether Edwards prohibited you from having a personal blog, but it is reasonable to ask if he supports what you said on it.

"Reasonable people," I thought, "can tell the difference between a personal blog post and those I'll write for the campaign." What I naively failed to understand was that there is no relationship between what reasonable people think and what will be used in a partisan bout of mud-slinging.

What I also failed to understand was how much McEwan and I would stick out.

So you thought he would hire you for being a rock star, but not listen to what you were singing?

I was aware that I didn't exactly fit the image people have of bloggers who join campaigns -- the stereotype being 30-something nerdy young white men who wear khakis and obsess over crafting their Act Blue lists. I wasn't aware that not fitting the image would attract so much negative attention. In fact, I mostly saw this all as a baby step in the direction of diversity, since McEwan and I differed from the stereotype mostly by being female and by being outspoken feminists...

Lorie Byrd blogged It is hard to believe, but I am almost convinced that Amanda Marcotte does not yet realize that she lost her Edwards campaign blogger gig due to words she wrote that Edwards could not defend. She has convinced herself that all problems were a result of a rightwing machine set on destroying her because she is a woman. Typical liberal attitude -- none of this could possibly have anything to do with the outrageous and profane statements of Marcotte. It is all about being a victim.