A New Chapter in the Edwards Blog Flap

Less than a week after former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) decided against firing two campaign bloggers who had written allegedly anti-Catholic comments, one of the two bloggers has resigned.

Amanda Marcotte announced Monday evening that she has left the campaign. She wrote on her blog: "I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign."

Marcotte seemed to have weathered the storm over the "highly critical and profane thoughts about topics including the Roman Catholic Church" that she and another Edwards blogger -- Melissa McEwen -- made prior to signing on with the Edwards presidential campaign.

But on Monday, more of Marcotte's writing was called into question, specifically her review of the movie "Children of Men". In it, Marcotte wrote: "The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels."

In choosing to keep Marcotte and McEwen on staff, Edwards said he was personally offended by their past comments but that he believed in giving everyone a "fair shake."

As The Fix wrote when the controversy initially broke, how campaigns integrate the unfiltered world of blogging into the more traditional-minded world of running a national campaign is very much a work in progress. The lesson here is that message control in the new media landscape is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

By Chris Cillizza  |  February 12, 2007; 11:24 PM ET
Categories:  Eye on 2008 Share This:  E-Mail | Technorati | Del.icio.us | Digg | Stumble Previous: Huckabee Makes a Splash in S.C.
Next: Analyzing Mitt Romney's Announcement Speech

The comments to this entry are closed.