Weblogs

The Governing Weblog

Forget the campaign weblog. The rarer creature – unlikely to be seen, much less perfected – is the governing weblog.

I don’t know what most people expect to become of the campaign weblogs once the election is over, but here’s a guess that virtually none will survive to be incorporated into a government site. And if they do, they’ll be even less revealing than the campaign blogs, which aren’t exactly thrilling reading.

That’s because there is a huge difference between campaigns and governing, even taking into account the “permanent campaign” that became a hallmark of the Clinton administration. When you’re running for election, you need to appeal to lots of people who may not know you. Unless you’re the incumbent, you have little official infrastructure to depend upon, so a weblog is one way to get the word out and connect your supporters. But once you get elected, you have a bunch of competing priorities, not the least of which is doing the job you were elected to do. Frankly, I’d start to worry about a public official who spent tons of time posting to his or her weblog while in office.

In politics, weblogs can fill some roles. They can push a message into cyberspace (and sometimes into the mainstream media), they can give you a way of bringing people into your organization, and they can provide you with a platform. Weblogs are perfect for back-benchers, the minority party in Congress and insurgents. They’re not so good for incumbents, because for them it’s mostly about control. If I’m president (or senator or congressman), I’m breaking exactly no news on a website save for an Internet-specific initiative. Maybe that changes in a few years, but the idea of the Senate Majority Leader sitting down and writing “Just got back from a meeting with the chief lobbyist from XYZ Corp., and they want a tax break in the next bill going through the Finance Committee” is loopy. Government, as an institution, doesn’t work that way.

Weblogs have the power and the curse of being a mass medium, which means that even though they enable plenty of people to say exactly what’s on their minds to the world, chances are good that those people don’t want the entire world to read exactly what’s on their minds. Is it reasonable to assume that the same officials who issue mind-numbing press releases – if you like campaign blogs are boring, try some of these – would all of a sudden become Mr. or Ms. Candor on a website? (For those in doubt, the answer is “No.”)

During my time covering Congress, the only lawmakers I knew who spoke their minds nearly all the time did so because they were not particularly concerned by the consequences. It was a small group, with Ron Paul, Jesse Jackson Jr., Jeff Flake and Bernie Sanders among its members. It’s a stretch to say those four represent a good cross-section of the nation, but they would have entertaining weblogs.

So what, then? Change the way that government operates to promote candor? Ripping up the rules mid-game is a dicey proposition, and one that many incumbents would resist. Political scientists like to say that lawmaking and sausage-making are alike in that you don’t want to see either being done, you just want the end result. That’s only partly true. Watching the lawmaking process gave me endless insights into the people who run our nation. But those aren’t always the people you see on the campaign trail or in commercials or read about on their websites.

Weblogs could be a cure for that sort of glossing over, but there’s at least one very large obstacle: the power of the office. A president or member of Congress has any number of reasons to favor control over candor, and being hailed as a political blogging pioneer isn’t the sort of inducement that will change their minds.