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And never mind that it's in the country's best interest for the viper to be there.

By Moe Lane Posted in 2008 | Huffington Post | Obamafiles | The Best Democratic Primary EVER — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

First, the story behind the story.

Deep Inside ‘Bittergate’
April 15, 2008 - by Bill Bradley

It’s one of the great ironies of the campaign. The resolutely pro-Obama Huffington Post, the site Barack Obama chose last month to put out his statement on Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s outrageous comments, this month is the source of one of his biggest campaign crises. Its namesake co-owner, the conservative-turned-liberal commentator profiled recently in the New York Times as “Citizen Huff,” Arianna Huffington, was on David Geffen’s yacht in Tahiti when the deal went down.

(H/T: Glenn)

OK, to begin with: I don't begrudge Arianna either the yacht time or the Tahiti time*, but there's something funny about the way that HuffPo - one of the supposed bedrocks of the activist, populist Left - is casually admitted to being a tool and toy of the elites. "Citizen Huff" my Boston-Irish, working-class background, pasty-white tuchis. Don't get me wrong: she and her colleagues have put some work into making [their site just] so, and there's nothing really wrong about [doing that]. It's just kind of funny. Not as funny as seeing one of their pet bloggers take an orbital sander to the Obama campaign, but still funny.

Read on.

To summarize: contra some of the more amusing conspiracy theorists out there, the author of [the original] piece was somewhat torn about writing about the bitterness thing. The New York Times has run a piece on Mayhill Fowler: she is frankly not very unusual, but she is both fairly popular and well-known to the Obama campaign, which is both why they let her into the soirée, and why they didn't think to tell her to not apply the aforementioned orbital sander. At that, she almost didn't... but it was different, and he had said it, and nobody had actually gotten to agree to self-censor her reporting. So she went to her superiors, and HuffPo decided to run with it, suitably sanitized.

They needn't have wasted their time: Obama's people were not pleased. Also from the article:

The campaign is wisely staying out of the business of publicly expressing dismay about an activist blogger supporter publishing material on a very high-profile new media news and opinion outlet that is taken from a private event to which the press was not allowed. (I asked to attend the event and was told it was “private, off the record, and closed to the press.”) But Obama campaign sources say privately that they are furious with the situation.

They had a different expectation of Fowler. For the past year, the 61-year old Vassar graduate, wife of a wealthy Bay Area attorney, has hung around with people in the Obama campaign and traveled to several states, blogging all the while about her experiences and perceptions of the campaign and candidate. She was seen as an opinionated activist blogger, a supporter, someone who had a tendency at times to lecture the campaign in her copy but was ultimately an enthusiast. She was not viewed as a journalist.

And so it goes.

I expect that what will happen now is that the Obama campaign will take the wrong lesson from this exercise. They will react as per the title, and decide that their current treatment of bloggers was unrealistically generous, particularly when it comes to providing them with access. They will start vetting their venues, start limiting access to only the most reliable and established bloggers (and start insisting on having those bloggers clear their work with them first), start making a distinction between "official" and "unofficial" Obama blogs.. in general, you can expect that the Obama campaign will generally react for the rest of the primary (and the general, should they get that far) by establishing significant restrictions on how bloggers can get juiced in. This will lead, of course, to friction and a certain resentment, but from their point of view, better resentment than grist for the opposition's mill.

What they will not do is the simpler course of action: stop letting their candidate sound like an elitist. Because, you know, there wouldn't be an actual story here if Senator Obama hadn't decided to slander the Pennsylvanian working class for the amusement of the Californian wealthy. This is 2008, Senator: and while we don't have flying cars or transporter beams, everybody who saw Star Trek's communicators and tricorders said "yeah, we need those" - and so we have them now. We call them "cell phones," and somebody's going to be using their video/audio recording feature, everywhere you go. Everywhere.

Get used to it. Or not: watching you flail about over the "problem" like a gaffed fish will be pretty funny, and it won't cost me a dime.

Moe Lane

*No, really. My wife gets motion sickness easily and I burn when exposed to pictures of the sun.