By now you know that Sherrod Brown won't be doing his Meet The Bloggers appearance this Saturday. BFD posted a voicemail Monday from Brown staffer Phil de Vellis calling off Brown's long-planned appearance because the Congressman "doesn't want to sit down with Tim, who's cursed at his wife and admitted it in public and done some other things as well".
"Tim" is, of course, Tim Russo, whose blog, Buckeye Politics, has coincidentally been off line since Monday morning. (No, I don't have the first clue what's going on there.) Tim, one of MTB's main organizers, has been engaged in a running controversy with the Brown campaign about who-said-what-to-who in an interaction with the Congressman and his wife, PD columnist Connie Schultz, at an Ohio Democratic Party meeting in December. Words like "lying" have been thrown around by both sides. Tim has taken a few nasty online pokes at Schultz ("Pulitzer wife") as well as Brown himself. Somebody in Brown's campaign office posted pseudonymous comments at another blog threatening retribution (sort of), giving the merry-go-round another spin.
I've never posted about any of this. So just to make all parties equally unhappy, I'll say here that I have no idea of what to believe about the ODP incident, and I don't much care. (Whatever happened, it seems unlikely that this was Schultz's first experience with profanity, or Russo's first experience being yelled at.) I'm pretty sure that someone at the Brown campaign did something reprehensible with a computer in his office, and should be found and punished for the good of the campaign, but beyond that I'm not much concerned about pseudonymous blog-comment threats. I've cringed at some of Tim's posts about Brown and Schultz, he's given them plenty of cause to be pissed off at him personally, and if either of them challenged Tim to a fistfight it wouldn't bother me at all -- but it's no worse than the trash talk that happens in the back of the hall in every community or political group I've been part of.
The point is, no matter what you think about any of this, being pissed off at Tim Russo is not a good reason for Sherrod's decision to take a pass on Meet The Bloggers.
Along with Tim and George, I've been part of every single MTB session except the last one (Bill Peirce last Friday). That's fourteen out of fifteen interviews, going back to Bob Triozzi on August 3rd. Tim, George and I have had a few frictions along the way and we certainly don't always agree about the candidates or their positions. But the three of us, and the growing group of NEO bloggers who've recently joined us, have stuck to four cardinal (if unwritten) rules that insulate MTB itself from the slants and quirks of our individual blogs:
All NEO bloggers are welcome.In all fifteen MTB sessions to date, I don't think you'll find a single disrespectful question, a single instance of an interviewee being rudely cut off, or a single case of a blogger haranguing the interviewee (although I came close with one long, wandering question to Dave Abbott.) If you get your politics from cable, you'll find Meet The Bloggers unbelievably civil. God knows that's not because we're all boy and girl scouts on our own sites. It's because the format works for all of us, so everybody respects (and enforces) it.
Nobody hogs the microphone... you take your turn and pass it on.
Bloggers ask questions, interviewees answer them. We're there to get the candidates' voices on record, not our own.
Every word gets posted.
I'm not much of a believer in the mystical powers of the blogosphere, especially in elections. I don't think we're about to replace the MSM (though lord knows somebody needs to replace Channel 19) and I don't think politicians really need to court us, fear us, or imitate us -- not yet, anyway. (Of course, this may just be because I'm familiar with my own hit count.)
But I do think Meet The Bloggers is proving to be a good and useful contribution to the civic process in this community. I hear the same thing from a lot of people around Cleveland who aren't blogging cultists.
Whatever you think about his personal writing, Tim Russo has worked hard to make MTB as good and useful as it is. He's been an essential organizer and a good, substantive interviewer. And he's helped get more than a dozen other bloggers with varied perspectives into the room -- most of whom would have been there on Saturday to ask questions about real issues that Sherrod Brown wants to talk about.
So I think Sherrod's decision was a mistake. Not a terrible political misstep or a moral failure, just a mistake. I believe what Phil de Vellis says about his reason -- being too indignant with Tim to sit down in the same room -- and I don't question its legitimacy from Sherrod's point of view, but it's still a mistaken response.
Sherrod, there was a baby in that bathwater. You should have looked harder before you threw it out.