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Report from the blogosphere Sunday, Oct 30, 2005 By John Brummett You may not know that Wes Clark's spokesman told off Bill Halter the other day. Nor may you be aware that the article last Sunday in the Little Rock paper in which Attorney General Mike Beebe defended his record fighting utility rate increases was mostly a defensive response to coordinated Republican attacks via the Internet. Because you have a job and a life, you're probably missing out on the newest force in Arkansas politics. Yes, I refer again to these "blogs," meaning Web logs, where persons addicted to their computers do their thinking in public and update their sites at any and all hours. Max Brantley gets up early, I tell you. I've rolled out of bed before 6 a.m. on a few occasions and signed on to his Arkansas Times blog, at arktimes.com. It's by far the best all-round political blog in the state, and the only liberal one going strong. It's the best because, philosophy aside, it's run by real newsmen. It's not uncommon in that predawn grogginess to see that Max already has read the morning paper and become sufficiently outraged by the right-wing abominations of the day to have posted three or four diatribes already. It may be that these blogs reach only dozens. It may be - in fact, it is a sad fact - that many of them are published by persons of cowardly anonymity advancing childishly partisan political positions and exercising not one shred of journalistic integrity or responsibility or decency. And it's not just the people running them. Most of these blogs provide open threads inviting reader comments, usually under false names. You wouldn't believe what gets said. Or maybe you would. Still, the traditional political press is obliged to monitor these sites. Campaigns can't help but react to them. The blogs push issues, influence dialogue and facilitate smears. They help drive political debate as they cheapen it. They provide bar talk without the drunk driving, though not necessarily without the drinking. So, you're wondering about that reference to Wes Clark's spokesman telling off Bill Halter, the formal explorer of a race against Beebe for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. The intriguing thing is that, for a short time in the early autumn of 2003, Halter was a top-ranking travel aide to Clark in the general's presidential campaign. Tired of all the speculation about the Clark-Halter relationship, the Arkansas Times' blog asked Clark's office directly. The retired general's spokesman, Erick Mullen, replied with striking candor and presumptuousness. Mullen presumed to speak for Bill Clinton as well, saying that neither Clark nor Clinton had wanted Halter in the Arkansas governor's race and that both preferred Beebe because it was Beebe's "time." Mullen's statement chided Halter for implying that Clark supporters endorsed him when in fact only three guys with a Web site had done so. The two liveliest Republican blogs aren't as brave or responsible as the one at the Arkansas Times, since the bloggers maintain cowardly anonymity. One can be found at arkansasfamilycoalition.blogspot.com, and the other at arkansastruth.blogspot.com. Both seem to exist to serve Asa Hutchinson's Republican gubernatorial bid and trash Beebe, the latter with a vigor increasing with each new campaign finance filing showing Beebe to be the preferred candidate of the Arkansas business community. These supposed populists of the GOP hammer Beebe daily for selling out to his old utility friends and developers. But I don't see any evidence that these sites coordinate. It's not unusual for one to trash me as a Democratic hack while the other posts and recommends some article I wrote years ago criticizing Beebe's ties to special business interests. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
