At least one presidential candidate is not ashamed to count bloggers among his friends: according to Katharine Q. Seelye at The Times,
Mike Huckabee held a little event here on Tuesday to thank the roughly 700 bloggers who, he said, were responsible for keeping his campaign alive. Because he had no money and initially got very little media attention, he said, he could not have kept going without their dedication.
He said the bloggers, whom he called his “secret weapon,” spent their days “pounding their keyboards and hitting ‘send’ in the middle of the night.” Ed Rollins, his campaign consultant, said none of the bloggers were on Mr. Huckabee’s payroll, chuckling at the idea of a payroll.
At the AMA panel discussion on political marketing back in December, Patrick Ruffini noted the respect with which Huckabee’s campaign had treated bloggers, for instance by linking reciprocally to blog sites that supported the candidate — a simple thing that most campaigns have not deigned to do. This Chuck Norris-attended event provides another example. Whether Huckabee is really sincere in the belief that bloggers saved his campaign or not is outside the knowledge of e.politics, but his campaign and Ron Paul’s definitely demonstrate the power of political outsiders to defy the expectations of the establishment. Up the revolution!
Update: See also event coverage from The Hotline, including details of Huckabee’s band’s set list.
Update 2: Huckabee’s not the only one thanking bloggers, as this Chris Dodd video shows (via tPrez).
– cpd