When word zipped out through the internets that John Edwards had hired one of those bitter shrews from Pandagon as his campaign blogger, I laughed almost as hard as I did when I read about his modest 28,000 square foot salute to America’s poor. Could it be, I wondered, that Edwards feels that he’s the “anointed one” of this election cycle and thus doesn’t have to bother running a competent or diligent campaign?

There are a couple of things that you have to understand about presidential campaigns at this stage of the game: First, even the major ones are bare-bones skeletal operations. Second, the candidate is running them. He (or she) is basically the CEO of a small company that has only a handful of employees. At this point in the calendar, running for president is a hands-on project for the principals.

The preceding is a long-winded of saying that hiring a campaign blogger/blog wrangler is a significant operational decision for any of the Oval Office seeking outfits. On the Republican side, you’ve seen evidence that the campaigns have taken these hires seriously. Rudy Giuliani hired internet stud Patrick Ruffini. Mitt Romney hired Steve Smith, who had done a great job working for Bill Frist and who was well-known and well-respected in the right wing blogosphere.

The other thing about hiring a campaign blogger is that the job description for a campaign blogger is about 99% job wrangling and 1% part actual blogging. Any campaign blog is going to be by definition dull as dishwater. Campaigns need message discipline. Thus, they can’t hire a blogger who will run around under the campaign’s logo saying “screw them” or other such infelicities whenever the urge strikes. A real blog has independence and reflects the voice of its blogger. A campaign blog obviously can’t do that, unless the candidate wants to do the blogging himself.

CONFESSION TIME: IN MY forays into left-wing blogistan, Pandagon has been one of my occasional stops. It hasn’t been one of my frequent stops because the authors aren’t thoughtful or entertaining and they never make news. Their blogging merely serves to confirm the fact that they’re imbeciles.

There actually is a lot of interesting stuff in the left wing blogs. But some of the left-wing blogs serve as a vehicle for their authors to prove their ignoramus bona fides on an almost daily basis. I call this the Oliver Willis School of Blogging. For a wonderful example of this art form, check out Oliver’s mini-post regarding his indifference to the death of Barbaro. Ollie scolds, “The idea that so much ink is being spilt over a horse just kind of appals (sic) me.”

Of course, all bloggers are entitled to their opinions, even when they’re ill-informed or intemperately expressed. What is unfathomable is why a campaign would hire a person who delights in gratuitously causing offense as its representative.

Amanda Marcotte, the blogresss from Pandagon that Edwards hired, happens to be one of the worst of the lot. In fairness to Oliver who actually comes across as a nice albeit not particularly talented guy, Marcotte is a bitter, angry person who thrives on offering offensive and obtuse observations. Her now infamous post from just days before the Edwards campaign hired her shows Marcotte at her “best”:

I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good [obscene progressive participle] god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and [obscene past-tense verb] her against her will--not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

(Thanks to James Taranto for the creative re-phrasing that I’ve stolen here.)

Wow! Provocative and edgy stuff, no? Now can someone tell me why John Edwards decided to hire this person? It’s true there’s an audience for this kind of rubbish. But in her blogging capacities for the Edwards campaign, she presumably wouldn’t be allowed to write that kind of rubbish.

WHEN A CAMPAIGN HIRES an in-house blogger, fairly or unfairly it becomes liable for the stuff that blogger has written. To cite an obvious example, no campaign would hire Markos Moulitsas because it wouldn’t want to spend multiple news cycles talking about the “screw them” incident. Similarly, even though he’s never said anything offensive or moronic like “screw them,” I don’t think the Ace of Spades is in any danger of being summoned by any Republican campaigns. (The act of hiring Ace would instantly kill a campaign’s chances of winning the desirable Paul Anka fan-base demographic.)

So again, what was Edwards thinking? His campaign will spend a few blogospheric news cycles defending or ignoring the chatter about Marcotte’s past scribblings. In case you’re wondering, her observations on the Duke matter fit in nicely with her oeuvre. There will probably be enough chatter about this in the blogosphere that it will cross over to the cable news channels. I bet Marcotte will make Britt Hume’s “Grapevine” tonight and the “evil” CNN tomorrow. By the end of the week, she will be collecting a severance check from Edwards. (I just hope the amount isn’t so great that it slows construction on the energy efficient Chateau Edwards.) Her inevitable termination will trigger great outrage in the Netroots, who ironically her hiring was intended to impress.

This whole sordid episode should provide a valuable object lesson for campaigns as they think about hiring other bloggers: Before bringing them into the fold, read their stuff – see if you want to own it. I would have thought this was pretty obvious before the L’Aiffaire Marcotte. But I guess it comes as news to Edwards and his campaign.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.