Blogging 101 for Politicians: Tiptoeing Through the Minefield

Politicians don't do blogs.  Or at least that was what they said in the old days, before the 2004 election cycle.  The reasoning was that blogging was just another way to catch foot-in-mouth disease and find oneself subject to more ridicule.  Still, in 2005, when I participated in a political training program, one of the core messages was "don't write much - especially online".

It took me a while to decide to start blogging for that reason, but eventually I decided that it is more important to me to have free speech and use it to write than to run for office and win.  So if I ever decide to run and I lose because of something dumb I wrote ten years before that gets exploited in the wrong way (like this post, perhaps), that's just too bad.  I think it's sad that candidates feel compelled to hide their opinions for fear of offending voters.  They do it because they don't want their words misused or their ideas misconstrued, but that can also cost them elections.

But let's take a step back and reiterate what Elizabeth Edwards said: "the Internet is the last real democratic institution."  Her point is that the Internet can be like the New Hampshire living room or the local town hall meeting.  It's a place where true constituent communication is achieved one-on-one.  This is why politicians started turning around and saying, "hey, wait a minute - I want a piece of this."  (Okay, so I don't know any who actually used those words, but you get the idea.)

Here's today's history lesson.  Everybody remembers that Howard Dean came along and raised a zillion dollars online for his campaign, but what many don't remember is that just as he was becoming the flavor of the month for the Democrats, Gary Hart snuck in under their radar and launched what Wired News and 'political analysts' called the "first true weblog to be put up by a politician," meaning that he wrote his own posts and the comments were left open.  By doing that, he broke new ground.

Senator Hart was considering an official run but had a small, mostly online grassroots "testing the waters" campaign going and I ended-up running the Internet part of the organization.  That's a story in itself, but the truth is that selling the idea of a blog to him wasn't actually that difficult.  He's the kind of person who thrives on communicating with the people and does it through a variety of vehicles even now, including blogging for the Huffington Post.  He's highly intelligent, he understands the "technology revolution" and tends to take more risks than most other politicians due to his experience.  Two other people who were helping me with the campaign thought that a blog would be a good idea, so I gathered all our arguments in favor and pitched it to the would-be candidate.

Running a presidential candidate's blog was a lot of fun.  I heard through the grapevine that it was one of the most popular blogs in the world for a while, so that gives you an idea of how many people were visiting.  There are numerous political sites now that I'm sure get more hits a day than we were back then, but the norm of political sites is still that they are written by political writers, not the candidates.

One of the things that makes blogging difficult for politicians is that it is just another thing for them to do in a day packed with events .  In our case, our candidate found ways to write up posts rapidly while riding in the car or on his computer at night.  We only asked for one every week or two, so we could maintain interest on the site but not overwhelm him.  Being a prolific writer, it was easy.

Other campaigns caught-on and began launching their own blogs, but theirs had other people posting on them beyond just the candidate.  We stayed behind the scenes.  That was the way the people at the top of the organization wanted it.  Had it become a full-blown campaign with an official announcement and the whole works, we would've expanded the blog to more contributors - we already had draft posts in the works at the time.  As the 2004 campaign continued, the candidates kept posting, but less often as election day approached.  Now it's something seen more in smaller campaigns than at the national level.  Look at any Congressional candidate's web site for the 2006 election and you'll see there's not much being written by the candidates themselves.

The thing about tiptoeing around blogging as a politician is that it can be like a mine field: if you step in the wrong place, your whole leg might get blown off.  This isn't really any different than saying something inane to Letterman, but it travels faster.  Most politician-candidates feel that this is not worth the risk, so they leave all of the blogging, commenting, heckling and trashing to those who are pretty much full-time political bloggers.  There are other issues to consider when blogging as a politician, of course, but that's for another day.

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Originally posted at the Silicon Valley Moms Blog.