Blogging, John Edwards & Jerry Ford

I missed Jeremiah's post on Scoble and John Edwards.  As usual, he has done more homework than I bothered to do and points to John Edwards' blog, which I had not bothered to look for prior to my previous post.

Jeremiah asks the right question:Is Edwards really writing it? Four years ago, many of us thought Howard Dean had a pretty good blog.  The problem, it turned out, was that Joe Trippi was writing it.

On a quick look, the blog is on a "not bad" level.  You can feel the author struggling with the "I-you" style and to informalize the language. I guess, what I'm hoping to see is those little spoonfuls of transparency that lets me see a real human in there, one with the vision and stature to lead a troubled, divided and powerful democracy.

It's fitting that this flash of political stuff has come into my crosshairs just now. I've been thinking about Jerry Ford all day, listening to NPR, which has done an uncharacteristically superior job of remembering him.

Jerry Ford was the most human president I have known. You had the sense, that you could have a beer with the guy and share a good laugh. He redefined presidential transparency, when his wife Betty talked publicly about her bouts with addiction and breast cancer.

This is what we seem to have lost. We have packaged our elected leaders, with so much smoothing and glossing that it is difficult to see the real human doing a real job, trying and sometimes failing to set a nation on course.

Blogging is supposed to let us do just that--get to see the human inside. If it succeeds, than blogging will help people make wiser elective choices based on a new ability to get up closer and more personal with  people  claiming to be public servants. 

If blogging fails to do this then it becomes just another channel into which the glad-handers and synchophants can stuff more marketing crap.
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Comments

[Joe Trippi]

shel -- "The problem, it turns out, was that Joe Trippi was writing it." ????

Our blog was completely transparent. When a post went up it was signed by the actual person who wrote it. Usually Zephyr Teachout, Matt Gross or me. Howard Dean posted perhaps a handful of times over the course of the entire campaign -- and they were almost always short "you are terrific!" posts.
Anyone reading Blogforamerica knew all along who was writing the posts and knew that Howard Dean was the most awkward blogger on the planet. In fact there was a commentary on David Wienberger's Joho blog that pointed out that you could tell the Howard Dean Post's were authentic because of how bad they were.

[Jeremiah Owyang]

He's deployed quite a few things, pretty interesting.

As someone who's studies this from a corporate perspective, I question the authenticity of all of these blogs, podcasts, and video.

A more detailed review to come...

[shel israel]

Joe,

I stand corrected and apologize for the implications of the way I wrote it. Thanks, Joe.

[Chris]

It was in 2006 that I became cynical about social media.

Not *anti* social media -- it's a revolution in the way we exchange information. Just a great deal more cautious about accepting it at face value.

Witness the lonelygirl phenomenon; Sony's faux "kids" hawking product before Christmas; bloggers taking money to write unattributed pitches; click farms gaming Digg for pay; and yesterday's revelation that Microsoft is running around bribing tech bloggers with free laptops. If that sort of thing happened at the Wall Street Journal or ABC, heads would roll. And rightly so.

I get the sense that 2007 will be a year of reckoning for this sort of thing. We bloggers need to do some deep thinking about ethics unless we'd like the government to do it for us.

As for President Ford, I still think he should have let Nixon be tried. Perhaps subsequent Chief Executives would have been less eager to circumvent Congress, lie under oath, and send our troops to war under false pretense if there were the real possibility that an American president could really end his career in prison.

But hindsight is 20/20. Ford was a civil servant of uncommon decency, and we were fortunate to have him. I'm pleased he has been so warmly judged by history, and hope it is still possible that men of his integrity find their way to the Oval Office.