Palin, pregnant pauses and election by Blogosphere

Monday, September 1. 2008

Palin, pregnant pauses and election by Blogosphere

From the OK its linkbait, but its interesting linkbait dept:

From the Indy comes the story that US VP candidate Sarah Palin's 17 y/o daughter's pregnancy, non termination and impending marriage is a let down after far more scurrilous rumours:

McCain officials said the news of the daughter's pregnancy was being released to rebut what one aide called "mud-slinging and lies" circulating on liberal blog sites.

According to these rumors, Sarah Palin had faked a pregnancy and pretended to have given birth in May to her fifth child, a son named Trig who has Down syndrome. The rumor was that Trig was actually Bristol Palin's child and that Sarah Palin was the grandmother.

A senior McCain campaign official said the McCain camp was appalled that these rumors had not only been spread around liberal blog sites and partisan Democrats, but also were the subject of heightened interest from mainstream news media.

"The despicable rumors that have been spread by liberal blogs, some even with Barack Obama's name in them, is a real anchor around the Democratic ticket, pulling them down in the mud in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their 'campaign of change,'" a senior aide said.

Some liberal blogs even had Barack Obama's name in them! Who woulda thunk?

Even Michael Palin & the Pythons can't make this stuff up - I'm afraid this story has much more human interest than the VP / Miss Alaska one, so it will run and run.

Last US Presidential election the blogosphere was a small factor, so handling it is still an unknown, and it has some interesting characteristics (eg story-porpoising) and a high level of persistence.

Politicians have been courting the blogosphere this time - initially for fame and (mainly in Obama's case) for money - but like all previous media, it will probably prove to be a fickle friend and bite the hand that was trying to feed it stories. The difference is in control - how do you put this sort of thing back into the Blogbox?

And does it matter? I suspect more than one would imagine, as I suspect that the intersection of blog-users and swing voters is fairly high.

One also wonders what the war of attribution will look like now on wikipedia

Posted by Alan Patrick in Blogging & Blogs at 18:19 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Nice, McCain. What kind of soldier uses a pregnant 17-year-old girl as a political shield? You knew what this was going to do, how it would divert attention away from your policies. You are throwing Bristol under the bus.

#1 Lucas on 2008-09-01 20:08 (Reply)

What's the big fuss? The Palin campaign was planning to announce this before the birth, in... December, perhaps.

Why did the presumptive VP nominee bother to deny the scurrilous claims? These things happen to politicians the world over and any big-time politician knows there's a bit of heat in the kitchen.

But it's troubling that the AstroTruth Squads on the Right have yet again taken the free pass to make up a version of the story that starts with "Because Liberal bloggers...". Let's show the actual stories, perhaps, if they exist, with references to the "wingnut radio" (aka, "talk radio") rumors, showing that no, the bloggers' crime was in exposing stories that were already extant.

Absent this, the "outrage" of the McCain campaign seems a way to yet again tar Obama with irrelevant "celebrity" status.

They deserve some questions, such as, "Why does McCain think that the American people shouldn't have been trusted with the choice of knowing the candidate's family situation?

"When were you planning to tell the delegates who are charged with making a political decision about your and your VP-nominee's political readiness to carry the party torch?

"If you withdraw her name, (or if she is made to step aside under fire as has happened in our lifetimes), would the Grand Old Party ever recover from the anger that the Right Wing would carry?

"What, exactly, did Sarah Palin mean when she said her campaign was all about women being able to 'do it'?"

#2 Walt on 2008-09-02 12:35 (Reply)

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