"Edwards draws more from the ranks of upper income voters than do the other candidates."

Not a surprise: the most progressive candidiate always does well among the well-off. And thanks for your concern, but once the Labor endorsement start kicking in ans the low-information voters start learning about the candidates, Edwards will do just fine among low-income voters. although he faces an uphill battle in the effort to win support from low-income blacks.

It's too bad that these dynamics exist, because it means a lot of the most interesting political practitioners can't also be parts of the public conversation except between election cycles, or can't blog in any but the most anodyne fashion.

Of course, one of the reasons that this dynamic exists is because every time a blogger affiliated with a campaign says something that isn't innocuous, you sadly shake your head and wonder when the campaign will ever learn.

Mudcat = douchebag.

People who think they are special because they go to the opera are, indeed, annoying. Even more annoying are people who think they are special because they don't go to the opera.

OT, since The Editors don't have comments:

Thank you thank you thank you for disabling registration. Despite having been a paid subscriber since the early 90s, and despite my checking the 'remember me' box, it never remembered me. It never called, it never sent flowers, it didn't even remember me when I was already logged in, so I had to type out my everything every single time.

Thank you.

Note: It's Dave Saunders, not Steve.

Sure high income voters support Edwards. We realize that unless the American system is fixed, we will be living in gated communities in the North American versions of Rio.
I would much rather pay 5% more now, than 20% more later, or 100% when the riots/revolution comes.

Well, but "mudcat's" blogging is exactly *not* like amanda's. Amanda's problematic blog posts all took place prior to her hiring by edwards and could legitimately be seen as outside her activities as the manager of edwards' net efforts. Mudcat's posts were after he had been hired and were explicitly directed at telling some of edwards' own supporters--if not hte majority of edwards' own supporters--that they should STFU and sit down and that they and their votes were explicitly hindering edwards' and mudcats' efforts to get them some high value southern votes. Mudcat--on his employers time and money as far as anyone can see--used his position in edwrds' campaign as away of explicitly attacking (a reason for attacking) other potential edwards' supporters.

Amanda's religion posts were done before she was working for edwards, and would not have affected any actual edwards supporters. And she was attacked by donohoe whose whole shitck is to attack the entire democratic party. those attacks would have occured without her and are still occuring without her. But mudcat himself is pivotal to this smear campaign because its being led by mudcat.

aimai

I was under the impression that Webb's win was largely due to Northern Virginia becoming more Democratic.

What Aimai said. And there's a substantial difference between the words at the center of the Mudcat controversy and the words from Amanda/Melissa (and without having checked Pandagon this morning yet, I wouldn't be surprised to see a "So, Mudcat can be Mudcat, but Amanda can't be Amanda?" post - because if "Boys will be boys" is an excuse, what's the non-sexist excuse for *not* letting "girls be girls"?). Oh, and the timing, too. That kind of matters.

On a related note, if the Edwards campaign had a rep for being particularly slick, I'd almost accuse them of trying to have a "Sister Souljah" moment against the netroots. Except doing *that* requires that you make the cheap-shot attack against a chunk of your base, you incite a reaction, and then you *don't* apologize. If you do the first two but then *do* apologize, it doesn't work (note to Edwards campaign folks: if you're going to apologize whenever people ask you to, you'll need to make plans that require not apologizing).

I disagree.

Saunders didn't cause a stir because he blogged about things that were controversial, he caused a stir because he started off insulting his audience. His audience got mad. He has apologized - as he should - and has realized that the right thing to do is talk about important issues. He's getting a lot less flack from his audience, now.

Amanda and Melissa were not attacked for things they wrote while they were working for Edwards, so there was really nothing they could do once the attack-dogs from the right got started.

Also, the people who attacked Melissa and Amanda were right-wingers who oppose all Democrats, while the people who were angry at Saunders were largely Democrats, many of whom support or were leaning towards Edwards. Bill Donohue was always going to hate Amanda and Melissa, but Saunders didn't have to piss off progressives by making them feel personally attacked.

But Saunders' learning curve seems to be a lot better than Joe Klein's, and that seems to be working for him.

On the other hand, we used to live and function in a world where the idea that not everyone needs to be part of the public conversation to have an impact was considered the norm

Used to? Narrow horizons, girl. There's a whole big world out there.

Yeah, it's interesting. At the moment, it sort of eludes me how you can support Edwards and not sort of pick up on what Saunders calls the pseudo-intellectual arrogance of city folk. But, a few years ago it would have. So I'll be patient and let them try to catch up. A couple more electoral debacles should do it. Then again, the republican economic agenda serves well heeled city folk particularly well, so maybe it will never happen. Which will be tragic for the rest of us, geographic region indifferent.

Mudcat broke one of the rules. He started talking about the class system in this country. Those who are the elites of this county, (Yes, both parties have their elites)don't like to hear about the class systems, especially when the guy talking about it speaking in a Southern accent.

Mudcat did us all a favor. Even though he angered a lot of bloggers, he also has bloggers talking about rural America, a subject that is not high on most people's list. Maybe sometime soon the candidate will take a look at these important rural issues.