Assassins

Melissa McEwan and Amanda Marcotte (right) are
modern-day assassins.

Update: Marcotte resigned as Edwards’ blogger today, and the campaign accepted her resignation. Let me state this as plainly as I can. I will not be supporting John Edwards in this or any other campaign he ever undertakes. He is a coward.

I say this with admiration. Their work
at the group blogs Shakespeare’s Sister and Pandagon has become
legendary in the Netroots over the last few years. They apply facts,
links, and snarkalicious commentary against everyone from Bush on
down.

Elizabeth Edwards knows the value of
such talent. She’s a blogger too,
although she would be the first to admit she’s not as good as those
at Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister. A few interviews later, McEwan
and Marcotte had been hired by the campaign of her husband, former
Senator John Edwards, as Internet outreach director and head blogger,
respectively.

Bill Donahue is an assassin of the old school. His specialty is the quick quip, the one-sentence
dagger to the heart. TV people say he gives good quote. He claims to
speak for the Holy Father but liberals believe he speaks for a
predecessor in Benedict XVI’s old job, Torquemada. He gives the full
Baltimore Catechism. (Update: For more on Donahue click here. And still more.)

This week saw an important
confrontation between the old polemics of Donahue and the new
polemics of the Netroots. Once Edwards hired Marcotte and McEwan,
Donahue went into full dudgeon. He called in all his media chips. He
condemned the two as foul-tongued harlots.

Donahue (right) did this because he was scared.
Right now the TV media still trumps the Internet. And Republicans own TV.
Except for a very few outposts of sanity, like Keith Olbermann and
the Daily Show, TV politics is based entirely on the Nixon Thesis.
Even those who claim to be liberals, like Chris Matthews and Joe
Klein, still believe in that Thesis with all their hearts,
yeah-butting on behalf of the Clinton AntiThesis which held, in its
final post-1994 form, that the Thesis could only be moderated and turned
(sometimes) toward moderate ends.

Which is nonsense. Every political
Thesis reaches a period of excess. The Pullman Riot
and the Bonus Army. The
hippies. A Benjamin Harrison or
Herbert Hoover or Lyndon Johnson comes to power, proclaiming the
utter righteousness of the old order, and events spin away, while the
medium that old order depended upon fulminates incoherently. Mencken
did it. Lippman did it. Given the innate viciousness of the original Nixon Thesis,
its presumption of absolute power, its assumption we were in a
life-and-death struggle with enemies without and within, people like Chris Matthews (below) are their direct heir.

So the battle was joined and, probably
because Elizabeth Edwards understood the stakes, the
bloggers were kept
on.

But that was not the end of it. Nor
should it be. TV and the Nixon Thesis feel naturally threatened by the depth and breadth
the Internet brings to politics, and will continue to bring bloggers
down. It makes the medium a natural ally for people like Donahue and
the simplicity they sell.

Now that Donahue has identified
himself as a target,
Left Blogistan must take him
down. Extremists
who use TV must be taught the lesson, that evidence against you can
and will come out, that the easy hit-and-run days are
over. 

TV bookers and rival campaigns  
must be taught that there’s a boundary on the right for “good
quote” just as there has been, for 40 years, a (constantly
shifting) boundary on the left. If people outside the boundary want
to compete on the Internet, let them. But there are no guarantees on
this medium, you shout and no one may listen.

This is a vital battle on the way to
2008. Only by establishing boundaries like this
can Democrats level the playing field .
Only by taking Donahue down can they silence false charges .

There is one rule for Republicans and
another for Democrats because the Nixon Thesis is assumed true by
everyone on the dominant medium, regardless of their supposed
politics. Understanding that, fighting that, and ending that is the
key political battle of 2007, not the New Hampshire primary.