Edwards keeps his bloggers

This is about as insider-baseball as it gets: John Edwards hired Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister to blog for his campaign website, among other duties. These young women -- being bloggers, and popular ones at that -- had occasionally resorted to language and topics that could offend some. Especially wingnuts.

The right-wing blogosphere, in it's never-ending crusade to scalp anyone, at any time, for any reason or no reason whatsoever, predictably went insane(-er).

Edwards, after a too-long period of silence, has decided to keep the bloggers on staff. Good for him. Firing them would have just chummed the waters for these freaks, aside from punishing Amanda and Melissa for doing nothing wrong. (A note for posterity: In the 21st century, everyone everywhere will have expressed an opinion on the Internet. Politicians need to anticipate this and deal with it.)

Chester Scoville at the Vanity Press writes:

Harrumph. I am not pleased with the apologetic tone that the Edwards campaign has decided to take here. Nor am I pleased with the patronizing, big-daddy tone of Edwards's own statement. It's good that Edwards has decided not to ground fire his two naughty little girls bloggers because of the whining of a few of his enemies, but this is still triangulation. In fact, it's capitulation. And it stinks.

I understand the sentiment, I really do. But triangulation? My read of Edwards has always been that he's a devout, middle-aged southern American man. His statement may be paternalist and apologetic, bending the knee and the neck to the fundies, but it strikes me as basically sincere because my read of Edwards is that he's that kind of guy.

I dunno. People obviously have different reads of politicians, and doubly so over events like this. I want to be clear that I'm not wild about Edwards' statement or his general handling of this -- I'd love to see some spine from a Democrats, any day now -- but "triangulation" seems to imply that Edwards' statement is something other than sincere, which I don't believe it is.

Whether that's actually a net plus for Prof. Scoville or anyone else is of course up to you.