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Saturday, February 17, 2007

Update on Marcotte and Mediation (And Why I Still Support John Edwards)

Yesterday, Amanda Marcotte published an extensive account of her truncated tenure as blogmaster of the Edwards Presidential campaign and the circumstances that attended her resignation, "Why I Had to Quit the John Edwards Campaign." I would encourage everybody interested in this enraging incident to suffer through the annoying half-minute ad that blocks immediate access to Salon and then to read Marcotte's piece. I am hoping the folks who click-through to the article will include especially all those who presently incline to the opinion that this ugly episode manages to make Edwards unworthy of the American Presidency whatever happens over the year and a half that stands between where we are now and where we will be when we actually vote for our next President.

Marcotte unsurprisingly refrains from saying much of anything that would put her former employer in a harsh light, and although I disagree with those who consider this episode a deal-breaker for supporting Edwards (who remains, for now, the Democratic candidate I like best of those on offer), the fact is I am personally much less happy with Edwards than Marcotte appears or pretends to be here. Nevertheless, Marcotte's piece does end up focusing exactly where I do myself in thinking through the significance of these events: She uses the episode as a lens through which to contemplate the worrisome media landscape of contemporary American partisan politics and she concentrates on the implications of this incident especially for women and feminism in the face of empowered Patriarchal Republicanism.

Early on, Marcotte writes: "The right-wing noise machine's favorite trick, possibly its only trick, is to select a target and start making a fuss, hoping that by creating the appearance of smoke, just enough people will be fooled into thinking there's a fire. Unfortunately, it works."

Although she has no delusions of grandeur she does highlight the chilling continuities on this score between her situation and others that have wreaked havoc on American political life in recent memory: This mass-mediated conjuration of sulfurous smoke and frenetically flung shit "was the method used to railroad Bill Clinton (Whitewater, Vince Foster, state troopers) and the method that ushered the nation into war with Iraq (WMDs and so on). This time they were only attacking a lowly rookie staffer on a Democratic campaign, but the M.O. was the same."

Although Marcotte also offers up some encouraging tidbits about countervailing forces aborning in the liberal blogosphere, and insists that progressives resist advice from inside the beltway to "clean up our acts" to insulate ourselves from such attacks from the right wing noise machine (as if that could work in the first place, and at the cost of the authenticity and vitality of our expressiveness and connection to our actual diverse concerns and actual power as citizens) -- the fact is Marcotte's focus is on problems and frustration rather than hopes, and this makes perfect sense to me. For the whole breadth of the case she makes, readers should click through to her piece.

Close to the end of her essay, Marcotte raises two chief areas of concern, and they seem to me very astute. And so, I will close by letting these speak for themselves. For the rest, again, I encourage those concerned with this issue to read the whole piece.
Whether or not it was the intention of the right-wing noise machine to throw more obstacles in the way of Democrats who want to play to their pro-choice, pro-gay rights feminist constituents -- it's also plausible that the right-wing noise machine was working on pure misogynist emotion -- the episode has had a chilling effect on the future of Democratic outreach to feminist communities, particularly the younger ones that flock to computers for political information as earlier generations flocked to television sets and newspapers.

Equally alarming is the possibility that this episode was something of a test case for the right-wing noise machine. The right blogosphere is mostly a sideshow act for the Republican Party, providing a cheap source of noise and noncontroversies to help professional shills like the Catholic League and the Heritage Foundation degrade the political discourse in this country, throwing culture war bombs to cover up unpopular Republican policies like starting a war in Iraq.

This locates both blame and concern precisely where, for the most part, they should be, it seems to me.

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