The esteemable James Capozzola, writer of one of the left’s finest blogs, The Rittenhouse Review, is apparently mulling over running for United States Senate in 2004, as a challenger to sitting Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter. I read Rittenhouse daily and would unhesitatingly vote for Capozzola, if I lived in Pennsylvania. (Which, after all, could end up happening, with the frequency of our moves lately….) But I remember the brouhaha between Rittenhouse and Little Green Footballs a while back, and that’s got me thinking. Not so much about that incident, in which I thought Capozzola went a bit over-the-top, but about some of the effects that the Internet — particularly blogging, bulletin boards, and Usenet — are likely to have on political candidacies in the future. I’m not talking about political commentary sites, which have already started to show signs of muscle — witness the way Atrios and others kept the Trent Lott story from dying on the mainstream press’s vine — but about what happens when bloggers and people who have made other postings to the Net start running for office.
We’ve seen, in recent campaigns, how the press likes to dig into candidates’ pasts, bringing up very old writings and incidents from more than two or three decades before. The high-water example of this, to my mind, is the whole business about Bill Clinton and the Viet Nam draft. In the case of Jim Capozolla, the existence of The Rittenhouse Review will make it much easier for anyone to research Capozzola’s opinions and general stances on the issues, which on the face of it can only be a good thing. But I’m not even so much thinking of Capozzola’s running next year but some young person blogging today – say, a nineteen-year-old college student – running for office in, say, 2028. I wonder if the semi-permanence of Web writings – especially the Usenet archives, where just about any goofy belief under the sun can be found expressed by someone, somewhere – will be held against future candidates, exacerbating the problem of recent campaigns in which candidates’ lives are pried into twenty or thirty years prior to that person’s seeking of office. I expect to watch press conferences and interviews with candidates in the future, with questions like this:
Congressman, in 1998 you wrote a Usenet post in which you said that any Republican willing to vote for impeachment should be castrated. Do you still endorse castration for your political opponents?
Mr. Mayor, you’ve proposed for your Fiscal Year 2027 budget a ten percent increase in public-school funding. How do you reconcile this with your writings, on your weblog in 2003, that public schooling should be ended in favor of exclusive home-schooling or private education?
Sir, you are running for Congress in a district that is fifteen percent Jewish; and yet, in 1999 you posted to an Internet bulletin board that there was no justification whatsoever for Israeli opposition to a Palestinian State. Can you elaborate?
Sometimes you’ll see a portion of the Blogosphere erupt into a massive debate on the same subject. This happened a month or so ago, with D-Squared and his “Shorter Steven Den Beste” posts; a similar eruption happened last summer, over Demosthenes and the virtues/sins of pseudonyms online. These eruptions tend to be fairly ephemeral, though: even though the participants can get quite worked up, and their regular readers can flood the other participants’ comment sections, things tend to die down when the posts in question inevitably move off the front page. This is similarly true of Usenet, where even the biggest flamewar will eventually die of attrition once the participants become bored. And many such postings are made in something of a “heat of the moment”, when the posters or bloggers are focused not on whether they want the particular view they are expressing and the way they are expressing it available for everyone to see, and for all time, but rather on the argument at hand.
So it seems to me there’d be a certain dilemma for people presented with their own writings, years after the fact: they can distance themselves from them, which tends to involved manufactured events and speeches and writings designed to accomplish this task (and thus, paradoxically, keeping the story alive); or they can simply stand by their original words, which can then become an albatross around their necks. That’s not all, though: they can take a third tack, and simply ignore the questions utterly, trying to make virtue out of the very fact that they’re not answering. Here I think of George W. Bush’s refusal to answer questions about his drug use. Now, on the one hand, I’m not sure that whether he used drugs twenty years or more before he ever ran for President is entirely relevant; but on the other hand, his refusal to even discuss the subject seems a bit disingenuous. Ditto Clinton and Viet Nam: were his attempts in the 1960s to avoid service in a war just about everyone now agrees was a colossal mistake relevant to his ability to serve as Commander-in-chief in 1992? Probably not. But did those attempts go some way in painting a portrait of the man as something of a waffler? Probably. Candidates for office already have enough work to do, balancing the people they used to be with the people they wish to become.
The rise of “Gotcha!”-style journalism has been fairly roundly decried in recent years. If it’s going to get better — and I’m not sure it will — then it has to happen soon, because the rise of the Internet is just going to provide that much more muck to rake through — and it’s going to be more high-quality muck, too, because Net postings — by their nature, textual and somewhat disconnected from our everyday selves — tend to be a lot more provocative than the things we say in real life, to real people.
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