February 12, 2007

Marcotte Quits, Sun To Rise In East In The Morning

Amanda Marcotte resigned her position in the John Edwards presidential campaign today after spending the last week defending her past essays on her group blog. Having weathered the initial storm, Marcotte apparently decided that the controversy would prove too distracting for the Edwards campaign:

One of the chief campaign bloggers for Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards quit Monday after conservative critics raised questions about her history of provocative online messages.

Amanda Marcotte posted on her personal blog, Pandagon, that the criticism "was creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign." Marcotte said she resigned from her position Monday, and that her resignation was accepted by the campaign.

Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, confirmed that Marcotte was "no longer working for the campaign." She declined additional comment. ...

"No matter what you think about the campaign, I signed on to be a supporter and a tireless employee for them, and if I can't do the job I was hired to do because Bill Donohue doesn't have anything better to do with his time than harass me, then I won't do it," Marcotte wrote Monday night.

It's hardly a story anymore, as Edwards missed his opportunity to distance himself from Marcotte's earlier tirades about Christian doctrine such as the conception of Jesus, which she described as the Lord "filling her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit." Rhetoric like that created a firestorm of criticism about her hiring, and despite Marcotte's valediction, not all of it came from William Donahue and right-wing bloggers. As I noted last week, Politico quoted a press release from Brian O'Dwyer, the leader of the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council that called Marcotte a bigot. The Democratic Party organizer also called Edwards' decision to retain Marcotte "not only wrong morally – it's stupid politically."

I'm actually surprised that she quit, and at this point rather than last week when it might have meant something. As Daniel Glover and I discussed on CQ Radio last week, the story was just about over. It seemed unlikely that anyone would find more insulting language on Marcotte's blog than already produced, and the decision by John Edwards appeared to tamp down the topic.

And let's face it -- this story would not have had much more momentum in any case. Democrats were unlikely to anger the netroots by openly using it against Edwards, for two reasons. One, the eventual nominee will need these activists after the primaries, and secondly, Edwards is no threat to either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama anyway. By next week, no one would have bothered following the Edwards' campaign blog to check for signs of a meltdown.

Instead, as a number of bloggers have noted, Marcotte decided to take the opportunity to play the victim. Contrary to her assertion that we "right wing shills don’t respect that a mere woman like me could be hired for my skills," we Catholics drew attention to the fact that she engages in vituperative and demeaning attacks on religion and that Edwards appeared to have endorsed that by hiring her. Along the exact same lines, I would have criticized a Republican dumb enough to hire Fred Phelps as a spokesperson, as would Marcotte herself. She simply refuses to accept the fact that she wrote incendiary and bigoted essays about Christians and embarrassed Edwards by agreeing to work for him after doing so.

UPDATE: Patterico points to a review Marcotte wrote about the movie Children of Men this weekend that may have given Edwards a reason to push her off the bandwagon:

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.

That's actually fairly tame, comparatively speaking, but it does point to a certain tone-deafness after the eruption last week. (She liked the movie a lot more than I did; my review is here.) She didn't post it on the Edwards blog and it has nothing to do with the campaign, but it still reflects on Edwards' decision to hire her and what that says to moderate and liberal Christians to have someone with such overt hostility on his campaign.

UPDATE II: Bryan at Hot Air reminds me that a Republican would never hire Phelps as a spokesperson ... because Phelps is a Democrat.

UPDATE III: Longtime CQ commenter Keemo has a suggestion for Marcotte -- record her blog posts as a book, and she'll almost certainly win a Grammy.

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