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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