Edwards caves in UPDATE: No he doesn't

Looks like Edwards reversed his reversal and is keeping Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan after all. Good for him.

In case you've been too distracted by the psycho astronaut story to be following this, basically, the Edwards campaign put a couple of feminist bloggers (Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan) on the payroll to help with his outreach to the Internet political community. A wise choice, considering how more and more people are using their laptop as a primary source both for news and for commentary.

Of course, almost immediately, some of the usual right-wing suspects began calling for their resignation due to some inflammatory posts they had made in the past, and it looks like Edwards ALMOST took the cowardly way out.

Look, I understand how none of us can truly feel what it's like to be in the fishbowl of a presidential race until we've been there. Truly insignificant events get blown out of proportion by the media as a matter of course. Sometimes, you have to take the path of least resistance if you don't want your campaign to be bogged down on irrelevant non-scandals.

But still, I still see where the problem was. So Amanda engaged in a bit of... hyperbole... here and there as a blogger. Of course she did. It's part and parcel of internet political posts. Sometimes you resort to overly inflammatory rhetoric specifically to get a rise out of the opposition, not to mention garner some extra hits for your site -- and it looks like Amanda succeeded in this all-too-well.

It is nonsensical to treat this the same way you would, say, a newspaper column. For one thing, columnists have editors to constrain their more wild rants. It doesn't mean they're more polite or sensible than bloggers... it just means they have more censorship. For another, print columnists have much less competition for their audience's eyes in a given media market. Most cities have one to two daily papers plus one to two alternative weeklies intended for a general audience, and that's about it. But there are a good few dozen what I would call "big" political blogs on each side of the divide right now, plus uncountable smaller blogs such as this one, all demanding your attention. If you want to get your post linked to by other people, sometimes you have to go a little nuts and resort to, ah, "memorable" imagery. (such as Amanda's famous post about the God, Mary and the Holy Spirit, but I'll let you find that one on your own.)

In other words, the right-wing critics of Amanda and Melissa chose to use an unfair standard against them purely to score points against Edwards. He ALMOST caved (and I was quick to leap to judgement) but at the last minute, he did the right thing.