Here’s a quick example, out of John McCains XX million dollars “needed” to run for office how much is he paying his “blog outreach consultant”?

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Probably a good amount. But let me say this — it’s well spent. Because what most online outreach people do is try to coddle and flatter you, make you feel part of the press crowd. And if that means you maybe don’t put out that damaging video or deadly screed — if even a couple heavily read bloggers don’t put out one unique negative story that had real legs — then what is $60,000?
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I mean it’s cheap, right? Because you’d pay substantially more than that to kill that story or that analysis once it’s out.
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That said, since I don’t like “clash of civilizations” McCain, my piece will likely be a semi satiric take on how the “maverick” (who truly was one in 2000) is now so swallowed by the base…
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I’m thinking of calling it “John McCain: Now with More!”

Between you and Udell up there with man-in-town-hall/local-cable-public-access political videos, I’d be very afraid to campaign in New Hampshire. What an excellent reflection here. The idea of access and privilege as being more about ego and joining the ecosystem of media power than truly thinking about a candidates positions is exactly the issue as I see it. I think this really cuts through so much of the bull shit of A-list blogging that Downes often speaks to.

We have built these absurd notions of relevance and credentials on such a shaky foundation. Here’s a quick example, out of John McCains XX million dollars “needed” to run for office how much is he paying his “blog outreach consultant”? What are he consultants credentials? Does he have a blog I can read? Moreover, why would you need such a position if your ideas were solid and you believed in your vision? I know this is all very naive (deal with me) but a large part of me thinks that part of all this arrogant and wasteful superstructure around politics erodes the very ideas at the heart of any healthy political system: aggressive and open debate about ideas.

Without this all the spin in the world won’t save a ship from sinking. We need micro-politics, we need to move away from national stages and recapture our virtue as thinking citizens on a more local, contextualized level.

If we do this, the change will be far easier. I’m sure this is exactly what your own political blogging community has been doing, and it ain’t that different from making change happen at an institution or a university. Leaders can lead all they want, but not until some relatively large and active group of people get tired of being exploited and start exploring alternatives will things start getting really interested. In fact, in is the current logic of the leaders we now have that have helped put us into a situation wherein being an A-list political blogger means getting the “scarola” to make you credentialed and effectively irrelevant.