Internet can mess up a resume — or a campaign

BOSTON — I suppose you could describe these two women as cybertrailblazers. But their cybertrails, alas, followed them from a checkered past, not to the glorious future. And the blaze they created was a bit more like a flameout.

Bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan came in from the heady environment of the blogosphere to the more staid climate of presidential politics to work for John Edwards.

The political cyberspace where they were known as Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister is usually described with euphemisms such as "raucous" and "freewheeling." On that terrain, no weasel wordsmiths need apply. You win attention with controversy and get hits with an over-the-top persona and a vivid vocabulary. A campaign, on the other hand, no matter how much it wants netroots, is, well, controversy-averse.

Marcotte's blog style was described by Time magazine as "issues-based but not above snark and a healthy dose of profanity." McEwan describes herself as a "firebrand" opponent of theocracy: "I am, however, vulgar. And I am trash-talking."

I doubt these descriptions were in their job interviews with the Edwards campaign, but it didn't take long for a conservative watchdog to glean through the 24/7 postings of the two bloggers and come up with the sort of sound bites that leave teeth marks on a campaign. There was McEwan's description of Bush's "wingnut Christofascist base." There was Marcotte's slam on the Catholic prohibition on birth control as a way to force women to "bear more tithing Catholics." Within days, the two women resigned from the campaign and returned to the briar patch of their blogs.

This may be the first certifiable staff flameout of the 2008 campaign. But it's also about a clash between two cultures and two languages.

We are living now in both the blogosphere and the mainstream. One is ironic and edgy, challenging and partisan. The other is cautious and modulated. Marcotte's and McEwan's fate raises the question about whether it's possible to move from the world of ankle-biting pundits to presidential politics without every word sticking to your shoe.

We already know that in the digital world, the past is never past. As Simon Rosenberg of NDN, a progressive advocacy group bridging these two worlds, says, "All of us are going to be living every moment of our past lives. People are living with things they did and said in their youths in a way they never did before."