Yesterday, the DNCC's Aaron Myers wrote on Daily Kos:
We didn't hand off this project to state party officials, as was rumored. The DNCC published a list of requirements, we read applications, and we looked at lots of blogs.
I responded:
The rumor wasn't that it was "handed off", but that some state parties exercised veto power over the selections. I'd like to see Aaron deny that was the case, since the evidence to that effect is steadily mounting.
Well, here's what appears to have been the case:
As it turns out, I did talk to Matt Jerzyk of the credentialed blog Rhode Island Future, and he had a conversation with state party executive director Tim Grilo about the blog credentialing process. He asked about the process of credentialing bloggers. Grilo said that the DNCC called and asked for the party's input about each blog that applied, and the Rhode Island Democratic Party was told directly that their input would be valued and would be involved in the decision-making process about who to credential. Grilo said that the party was not given veto power but he did get the strong sense that their input would be a valuable part of the credentialing process.
So the rumor that state parties had "veto power" appears wrong, but state parties did get a strong say in the selection.
Most states parties did the right thing and made sure that worthy blogs got selected to sit with their delegations on the convention floor. But state parties in several states including New Jersey and New York apparently decided otherwise.
Finally, I've now heard that Aaron Myers, who heads this operation at the DNCC, is a tech guy. The DNCC made the mistake -- much rarer this days -- to have a tech guy handle blogs because, you know, blogs are computer thingies. And however brilliant Aaron may be with his technology duties (and everyone I've talked to sing his praises in that regard), he has been ill equipped in dealing with the blogging question. Stoller says Aaron told him last year that he didn't have time to read blogs, which would seem to be a requirement for someone having to put together a blogger credentialling process.
I suspect that this isn't Aaron's fault. He likely got thrown into this because his boss(es) thought, "bloggers are computer things, so we'll have our techie handle it". These sorts of things happen, however unfortunate they may be.
The smart operations, and again, most of them these days are, use communications/media people to deal with bloggers because that's what we are -- media. I'm hopeful that saner heads will prevail in Denver, and this little dustup will be fixed soon enough so we can focus on better targets.
