John Edwards' Hiring Decisions Raise Legitimate Questions about his Candidacy.

John Edwards hired some bloggers (who may or may not have professional experience on national campaigns) to help with his blogosphere campaign, apparently without reviewing those bloggers' past publications to determine whether they would be embarrassing to the Edwards campaign.  When I last looked, one of the bloggers had a graphic about "auto-fellatio" on the "Bios" page of her site.  There, it says, "Amanda settled for selling her soul to blogging when Satan confessed that even he had not the powers to turn her into the second coming of Diana Ross . . . [Amanda] does accept bribes." http://pandagon.net/bios/ http://farm1.static.flickr.com/82/250066 490_b00a21c263_m.jpg 

This might be funny to Amanda and a lot of other people, but it is not helpful in a presidential campaign that has to round up votes from people who are like us and people who are more conservative than we are.

The issue is not whether these self-reported things are true or not (I don't think they are), but rather whether these very public statements and others like them will help presidential candidate John Edwards to avoid scandal and win votes over the next 18 months.  This is not the stuff of professional national presidential campaigns, in my opinion.  For how many additional days between now and 2008 will this be the topic of articles in the New York Times?  http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ed wards-Bloggers-2008.html

Now, like President Bush's decisions, Edwards' decision to retain these particular bloggers in spite of their inappropriateness for their role proves that when Edwards hires people who are inexperienced and inappropriate for the jobs for which they have been hired, Edwards sticks by those hires no matter how much embarrassment and genuine damage their inexperience may cause now and in the future. This is not a good sign for the Edwards campaign any more than Bush sticking by Rumsfeld and "Brownie" was a good sign for the futures of Iraq and New Orleans.  These bloggers aren't "bad" people. They're just not appropriate for the very public tasks to which they have been assigned.

In terms of staff selection and discipline, the current round of news stories is eerily similar, fairly or not, to the embarrassment that arose when an Edwards campaign volunteer tried to buy a toy at WalMart while Edwards was simultaneously criticizing the retailer for its anti-union attitudes. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/17/politics/main2193507.shtml

These miscues are embarrassing and they eventually contribute to the public's impression of the candidate himself. But, this is just my personal opinion and only time will tell. 

Cross posted at http://francislholland.blogspot.com/

francislholland@yahoo.com