The below excerpts come from e-mails between Marshall Manson, of Edelman, and Rob Port of the Say Anything blog. They span a two-month period in 2006, though the first four selections all come from the same, original e-mail.
1. The intro (establish credibility and disclose who you are):
Rob: Hello. I hope you’re well. I just wanted to drop you a line and introduce myself. I’m a blogger myself (I contribute to Confirm Them and Human Events’ blogs among others), but for my day job—I do online public affairs for Wal-Mart, working with Mike Krempasky who runs Redstate.com.
2. The flattery (show familiarity with the blogger’s work):
3. The FYI (connect your client’s interests to the blogger’s interests):
As you probably know, Washington-based union bosses have been running a campaign against Wal-Mart. And it’s always a challenge when opponents organize to attack corporations. The companies always seem to have one arm tied behind their backs when they try to respond, so it’s nice to see folks like you defending them when it’s the right thing to do.
4. The ask (intriguing but soft):
If you’re interested, I’d like to drop you the occasional update with some newsworthy info about the company and an occasional nugget that that you won’t hear about in the MSM. Let me know.
5. The caveat:
(BTW—I hate to ask, but if the temptation arises, please resist the urge to cut and paste text from this. Others have fallen into that trap, and I’d be sick if someone ripped you because they noticed a couple of bloggers with nearly identical posts.)
6. The follow-up (I’m here for you; don’t hesitate):
I’m looking forward to continuing to send little nuggets your way. And, as always, we want this to be a conversation. So your questions, suggestions and rants are always welcome and encouraged.
Earlier this month, Kathryn Stetz of Qorvis Communications e-mailed TechCrunch, the world’s second most popular blog, asking to “order[] a reprint on an article” that appeared there.
The response, a couple weeks later, came from the blog’s founder and co-editor, Michael Arrington: “We’re a blog. We don’t do prints, let alone reprints.”
Oops. Or as former Qorvis staffer Jesse Thomas puts it, “Selling digital PR and not knowing that TechCrunch is a blog is definitely an embarrassment.”
Yet before we scapegoat Qorvis, it’s instructive to consider the context in which this snafu might have taken place.
First, I’d bet that Kathryn isn’t an account executive. People who exclude a title from their e-mail signature tend to be interns. Indeed, the task of requesting a reprint is one usually delegated to interns.
Second, the request to reprint is probably prudent. After all, reprints take place offline, and in the absence of a hyperlink, which is the conventional form of credit online, it’s worth asking if the blogger wishes to be cited in a particular way, or if he wants it noted that the material is copyrighted. (Indeed, one benefit of such a seemingly trivial request is that it establishes goodwill and opens the door for future pitching.)
Still, the fact remains that Qorvis screwed up: Bloggers should be treated with the same respect accorded to their old-media counterparts.
Of course, if such blunders can happen at a powerhouse firm like Qorivs, can’t they happen at your firm, too? In fact, it’s likely they already have.
Even in Washington, these comments exhibit an unusual pugnacity—so much so that I asked the speaker, the illustrious Grover Norquist, if he were simply being playful, interspersing witty asides into his diatribes, as seems to be his wont. (The question followed a 40-minute talk on his new book, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives, and took place earlier this week at the office of Americans for Tax Reform, of which Grover is president.)
Certainly not, he retorted, his voice rising. Politics is a deadly serious game, and when certain ideas have the effect of destroying both you and your country, then they absolutely warrant the appellation “evil.”
For example, he continued, we all agree that when Alabama Governor George Wallace, in 1963, physically blocked the entrance of black children into a “whites only” public school, that was evil. By the same token, when Senator Ted Kennedy denies black children the opportunity to escape, via private education vouchers, the swampland that public education has become—that, too, is evil.
Of course, there’s evil and then there’s evil, I countered. When 19 men crash two jumbo jets into a skyscraper and slaughter 3,000 innocent civilians, that’s evil. When someone tries to ameliorate our education system even in a counterproductive way, call him incompetent and call his legislation asinine, but don’t equate disagreements over public policy to mass murder.
Yes, there are levels of evil, Grover conceded, but the violence Democrats seek to visit upon us—steal our money, ban our guns, regulate the size of everything from our cars to our toilet seats to stop global warming—is still evil.
If you buy this, my bet is you’re an Ayn Rand fan. (Collapsing the distinction between ideas and actions, Rand equated Immanuel Kant with Adolf Hitler, insofar as Kant’s deontological philosophy facilitated Hitler’s holocaust.)
For those of us, however, who live outside the world of ARI and HBL and TIA—in the so-called reality-based community—the distinction between Democrats and Republicans is not one of evil vs. good. As any libertarian can tell you, there’s more that unites the two parties than separates them. There are real differences, to be sure, but I think it’s fair to say that almost every member of Congress votes in good faith. (Yes, this includes Ron Paul.)
As for Grover, he is the most brilliant strategist and networker I’ve ever met in politics. He is a genius at elucidating complex ideas, especially via memorable metaphors, and now that William F. Buckley Jr. has passed, he is the putative head of the conservative moment.
Yet the comparison to Buckley is instructive. As Radley Balko put it in an obituary,
Buckley was intellectually honest, engaged his opponents fairly, and was willing to admit when he’d been wrong (see his change of position on the drug prohibition and the war in Iraq, respectively). More importantly, he was no party hack. He was beholden to ideas.
If only we could say the same about Grover Norquist. Instead, I suspect we’ll remember Grover more for his hyperpartisan, polarizing Wednesday Meetings than for his thoughtful, reasoned contributions to our political discourse.
Addendum (3/20/0208): To use a point Grover himself made, when Republicans raise taxes, it’s not a victimless crime, since they degrade the Republican brand that is associated with no new taxes. By the same logic, when Republicans employ gross hyperbole, they hog the spotlight and crowd out those who share their political ideas but repudiate their rhetoric.
Here’s something I didn’t know, courtesy of Bob Novak: “No serious antiabortion legislation ever has included criminal penalties against women who have abortions, much less their parents.”
Indeed, as Daniel Allott recently noted, “Proposed state abortion bans in South Dakota and elsewhere explicitly state that aborting women would not be criminally penalized.”
Instead, anti-abortion advocates seek to prosecute the abortionist—he who induces the act, not she in whom it occurs.
I post this not because I agree with this agenda—far from it—but because facts are rare commodities in the abortion rhubarb.
Addendum (3/14/2007): Here’s an excellent example of why I love the Internet: Shortly after I wrote this post, someone left a comment on it referring me to Anna Quindlen’s 2007 essay, “How Much Jail Time?” In a much-quoted line, Quindlen argues that “there are only two logical [legal] choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place.”
The problem is, the very evidence she relies on rebuts her charge. And what fascinating evidence it is. In Quindlen’s words,
Buried among prairie dogs and amateur animation shorts on YouTube is a curious little mini-documentary shot in front of an abortion clinic in Libertyville, Ill. The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It’s as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: “I’ve never really thought about it.” “I don’t have an answer for that.” “I don’t know.” “Just pray for them.”
As strongly as I agree with Anna Quindlen on abortion in general, she is mistaken about its criminalization. As indicated above, serious anti-choice legislation targets those who administer abortions, not those who have them.
The same counter-question still applies—how much jail time should the doctor do?—but it behooves us who care about this issue to make sure our knowledge is equal to our passion.
Following 9/11, U.S. telecommunications companies allowed the NSA access to the phone records of their customers. They did so without a warrant and at the urging of senior government officials to help protect the nation from another terrorist attack.
My layman’s knowledge of the admittedly complex issues involved notwithstanding, it seems to me that the companies acted in good faith but in violation of their fiduciary duties to their shareholders.
As such, the question of whether they should receive immunity for their actions is easy to answer: No, they shouldn’t. Instead, they should have required a warrant before forking over vaults of data. Not only would such prudence have preempted the current controversy, but warrants exist precisely for situations like this—to codify facets of the law that are unclear.
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