[Republished from 2008Central.net]

TNR's Eve Fairbanks offers a plea for reduced surrogates, writing;

I haven't been around forever, but has ever a campaign felt so plagued by gaffes made by non-candidates?

[...]

Do McCain and Obama really need so many minions and representatives covering every cable show, every hour? Can't we do away with this evil proliferation of surrogates?

Indeed.  The campaigns definitely don't need the amount of surrogates and "sortagates" (my word for the person that seems to be speaking on behalf of the candidate, but turns out not to be) that they currently have.  From the campaign's perspective, murky surrogate-land gives them the advantages of having many surrogates to spread their message with the added advantage of being able to distance themselves or disown that individual should they mess up.  That being said, in many ways, the problem with the proliferation of surrogates isn't their increased presence.  Rather, it's the way that the campaigns and the press are using them.

Using surrogates to speak about the advantages of a particular policy position, to engage in debates and to speak on behalf of the candidate at times is a necessary and useful part of presidential politics.  That said, when a person is speaking as a surrogate, it needs to be made clear that they are in fact speaking on behalf of the campaign (and not just espousing their own views).  On the other hand, contrary to acting as a surrogate, when someone is acting as a "sortagate," the press should not treat them as though they were a surrogate.  Here in lies the problem.  The press, with the assistance of the campaigns, has successfully blurred the line between a campaign surrogate and someone that is just advocating/supporting a candidate.  Accordingly, when interviewing sortagates, the inquires should not focus on official campaign positions or responses, but rather, the inquires should be more in the direction of advocacy for whatever position they want to be advancing.

Now, if the press were to re-establish this line, then they would certainly be squandering the ability to gin up controversies and gaffes surrounding sortagates.  So, from a purely selfish perspective, it is highly unlikely that the cable news shows will go to any effort to clarify this mistake.  Perhaps the campaigns will?  Although surrogate/sortagate proliferation benefits them, it does run with the risk of losing control of the daily message because someone unaffiliated with the campaign may have sneezed, and because that sneeze sort of sounded like a curse word, it dominates news for a day.

My prescription: clarity.  The campaigns will likely need to start the effort, by making campaign spokespeople and official surrogates more available for TV interviews, so that the news folks don't have to rely on sortagates.  This will provide them with increased message control, and, could also increase the quality of discourse (given how utterly uniformed some sortagates are).  If the campaigns continue to allow the line between campaign spokespeople and sortagates to be blurred, then it's going to be pretty hard for me to be sympathetic when some stupid mistake from a sortagate blows up the news cycle for a day.  As far as I'm concerned, once a problem is identified, if you don't stop facilitating it, then you're complicit.

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