Back in the days when I worked on Howard Dean’s campaign, blogging was a new thing in politics. Governor Dean was revolutionizing the way the Web was used to raise money, communicate with voters, and generate goodwill for political candidates. It was pretty exciting to be a part of the whole thing.
Now it appears that the FEC and Congress are catching up with what the Dean campaign started, raising questions about what constitutes official involvement with a campaign and just when bloggers cross that line on the Web.
What really bothers me about this is that it might put some of the conversational aspects that make blogs so powerful out of reach for political candidates who want to have conversations with voters in the blogosphere.
In an ideal world, a candidate could check the RSS reader, see something he disagreed with and leave a comment on someone’s blog - following up later on with a post on his own blog about the issue and why he disagreed. That conversation would help the candidate to clarify his position on the issue to the public and possibly generate some goodwill with the blogger in question - even if the disagreement persisted. But it’s possible if the FEC decides to regulate blogs that this exchange could get the blogger and the candidate in hot water. These kinds of exchanges are essentially what makes business blogs powerful, so why muddy the waters for politics?
Like the Paradise Post said, the only situation in which a blogger should be considered part of a campaign is when he or she is paid to blog favorably about one candidate or unfavorably about another. Anything else is a violation of free speech.
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