"In the end," she explains, "I decided that if could really help Edwards win, I had an obligation to do it." She gave notice at her job, broke her apartment lease, hired movers, and began packing. On Jan 30, 2007, she wrote:

This is both my first post to the Edwards blog and my announcement that I'm joining the presidential campaign for John Edwards for 2008.  I'll be taking over the job of Blogmaster (mistress?) over the course of the month of February.... I'm originally from West Texas but have lived in Austin, TX for 11 years.  ...I love Austin, but I'm looking forward to packing up my two cats and moving to Chapel Hill this month.

To her surprise, the Right immediately tried to stir up controversy with misogynistic comments about her site content, her occasional profanity, even her looks. But they got nowhere. "I was sort of watching all these people carp and bitch about me," Amanda muses. "I didn't think my new job was big enough to attract national attention, so all I could think was, `Boy, these wingnuts are growing increasingly irrelevant, aren't they?'"

Then Bill Donohue of the Catholic League started to make noise. "He came out with this silly attack, calling me anti-Catholic," she recalls. "It was so absurdly wrong that I paid almost no attention to it."

Amanda didn't realize that she'd become the target du jour for people who despise liberals, oppose Edwards, object to independent, outspoken women, and who dislike blogs in general -- which, in this case, was a big chunk of the MSM. All it took was one irresponsible journalist to create a full-fledged feeding frenzy. "On Feb. 6, I got an email from an AP reporter named Nedra Pickler," Marcotte recounts. "She wanted a comment on Donohue's press release -- the one that accused me and Melissa McEwan (the other blogger hired by Edwards' campaign) of being vulgar and prejudiced. But I never got to respond. Within an hour, the story was already written  -- without comment from McEwan or me." Obviously, Pickler was trying to be provocative, not even-handed; predictably, all hell broke loose. The "story" that Edwards had hired a profane, bigoted blogger was everywhere. "Once the media decided this dustup was about anti-Catholicism, there was nothing we could say or do to stop it," Marcotte  recalls. "All we could do is hope it would go away." But it just got bigger. Within a few days, Amanda was front-page news in the New York Times. Bill O'Reilly ranted about her on Fox.

Marcotte was incredulous. "As a blogger I used to read all these posts complaining about the silliness of the media, the mentality of the pundit class. And then suddenly I was stuck in the middle of it -- all these people fabricating this controversy against me, in part because it was easy, and in part because it pressed `hot buttons' for their readers, whom they could engage without any real analysis."

No one seemed to care that Donohue's criticisms were off the mark -- that Marcotte had criticized the church's positions on political issues like contraception, but not the religion itself. "I was startled that almost nobody -- no news reporter I saw on TV -- got into any depth on what the articles Donohue was complaining about were like," she says. "I was just being engulfed in the `soundbite culture.' The vast majority of the people who noticed the story at all simply absorbed the `information' that I was anti-Catholic. That was the message." It was so pervasive that one day she went to a bar to get a drink, and was accosted by someone demanding to know if she was "that woman who was pissing off the Catholics?"

It all happened so fast that she didn't have time to react. "At first, I thought, `I have to respond to these lies and BS'... but I couldn't, because now I was working for the campaign. ...then I realized I just couldn't win. If I stood my ground, I was creating a problem for Edwards. If I walked away it was creating a problem for the blogosphere."

Her parents didn't know what to do, either. "It was interesting to see, because they're Fox News-watchers; they buy into the whole thing," Amanda says. "So I don't think it ever occurred to them, the human face of someone Bill O'Reilly will slander for political gain. They didn't stop to consider how much he slants things, and lies, until it happened to someone they knew."

In the end, Amanda never left Austin. Salon reported that on Feb 7, a week after her first Edwards blog post, she and Melissa were quietly fired by the campaign. Then, the next day, they were reinstated. Finally, on Feb 12, Marcotte quit for good. She was unhappy, but not bitter.  "Well, sometimes you've got to take one for the team," she says. "I feel the Edwards campaign is really about standing up for principle as much as possible, and they maintained that position throughout. But their choices were limited; if I stayed with the campaign, the media was going to lie and tar John Edwards about stuff that had nothing to do with him... and that I didn't even say! So I walked away. It wouldn't have been a very happy situation if I'd tried to fight it."

Marcotte's disillusionment with the media had only begun. "After I resigned and was able to tell my side of the story, I found out that no one in the MSM cared what really happened... and I found out that if you tell the truth on TV, they never ask you back. ...I went on MSNBC and they said, `Are you sorry, do you want to apologize? Apparently they expected this Oprah-esque apology," she scoffs. But Amanda wasn't playing. "Instead, I blamed THEM for doing something wrong, for giving the mike to these complaints about me without first learning what the complaints were about or who was making them." The hosts' response? "They changed the subject."

Amanda had an appearance scheduled on CNN, too, right after the MSNBC show. But she found it had been cancelled. She was never invited to return. "It certainly made me more angry about the shallow nature of political news coverage  in this country," she fumes, "I was pissed off to begin with, but this just really drove it home."

Is there any silver lining to the whole incident? "One good thing that happened," she says, "is that it highlighted for bloggers what we're up against here. It drew a lot of attention to the way that the right wing has this enormously well-funded noise machine, and how well it works. The posts that Donohue dug up were really old, so they've obviously got oodles of money to research stuff like this. It's clear that the Catholic league has this huge backfile of stuff they're waiting to use."

When a reporter asks if Amanda has any advice for other bloggers, based on what she learned from the experience, she quickly offers three points:

1. "Support the alternative media the best you can: Blogs, the Nation, local alt weeklies that have investigative reporting, and so on -- anything that opts out of the shallow `scandal of the week' political media methods and engages in real reporting. The whole episode really reinforced my belief in the extreme importance of alternative media. Unlike the MSM, they actually wanted to know what happened. They asked questions. Those people barely eek out a living, yet they do an incredibly important job."
2. "Never underestimate people's willingness to engage in the shallow politics of personal destruction. I guess my biggest failing was that I believed that most people are too grown up to deliberately destroy someone as  a part of some imaginary game. Not only is that untrue, but it seems that a lot of people actually get off on ruining others. I got burned badly, and learned really quickly about how ugly it gets. It was really disappointing, because I would have wished people are better than that; but I don't believe it now. "Knowing what I know now, I would tell someone: `Be prepared; politics is risky. You can be the best person in the world, and the worst person  in the world can run you out of your job for something you didn't even do.'"
 
3. "Know who your friends are... and depend on them. When things started to go down for me, I just trusted that bloggers are good people. I always looked to them for strength, and to do the right thing... and they did it.
   I think the victory the bloggers actually pieced together by making noise about what was right in this situation will, in the long run, be a bigger victory than we thought at the time. The whole situation made bloggers realize that we need to stand together or we'll hang separately. When it first started to go down, I was afraid that people would forget that, and start turning on each other. But everyone came together as one and protected our turf and one of our own--even people I hadn't gotten along with in the past. Our willingness to stand together really shone through.

   "Hang onto that -- that solidarity that bloggers had with one another. If we're ever going to accomplish the project we started, remaking progressive politics, that's the only way we're going to do it."

Today, Marcotte is unemployed and--since she gave up her apartment for the abortive move to North Carolina--without her own place. But she's doing alright. She recently signed a contract to write a book for Seal Press, called Not Your Darling (due out in Spring 2008) and has moved in with her boyfriend -- who agreed to support her for a year while she writes. (The catch: she has to do the same for him next year). In the meantime, you can find her on Pandagon.net.

For more about her experience, check out an article she wrote called: "Why I had to Quit the John Edwards Campaign," in Salon www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/16/ma rcotte/

I'm back with another reminder:  this project exemplifies the goal of taking care of your own.  When one of ours takes a hit, it's nice to know that we can all come together in support.  With that in mind, I ask you once again to pay a visit to the BlogPac Hero ActBlue Page.

'til next time...
Mike Stark