Crawl Across the Ocean

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Blog!

I decided to investigate the web presence of the candidates in Vancouver Centre. Svend Robinson (NDP), Hedy Fry (LIB), Tony Fogarassy (CON) and Jared Evans (GRN) all have personal websites, Joe Pal (CHP) and Heath Campbell (Marijuana) have no personal sites (that I can find) but have profiles on the party site, John Clarke (Libertarian) has naught but a picture on the party site.

But only one candidate, Fogarassy, has a blog, at least as far as I can see. Alas, the only value his blog provides is (unintentional) humour value.

Here is the most recent post, in its entirety:

"Debates!

If you watched either of the debates the last two nights, I bet you'll agree with me that we're the party to beat! The other leaders know that we have momentum and so they tried to attack the calm, cool and collected Stephen Harper.

The simple fact is that we're the party talking about new ideas and about change. The NDP lives on old, recycled ideas (good for them for recycling, at least) and the Liberals certainly don't represent change.

I'm really excited about the last couple of weeks! Hope to see you out there on the campaign trail!"


The other posts are similar. Tony seems like a nice guy, and I appreciate that you have to watch what you say as a candidate, but if he really is a lawyer who graduated from the London School of Economics, I kind of hope he's not writing this blog himself. I don't know if anyone followed the hilarious 'Harriet Miers' spoof blog back during Bush's aborted attempt to put his personal lawyer (Miers) on the Supreme Court, but if Tony's blog reminds me of anything, it is that.

I'd say that at least he gets points for effort, and maybe the idea is that it is better to have blogged and lost (credibility), than never to have blogged at all, but I think this is more a case of some things being better left unblogged.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with voting decisions (although I didn't get the part about new ideas - I thought the Conservatives were the party of old ideas), I just thought it was funny.

1 Comments:

  • Yeah, the one one one thing is important for sure. Still, I think that a well-written, interesting blog could be a real asset for a candidate, but the time involved in maintaining it, and the downside risk of having all your thoughts in writing probably outweighs the benefits for most.

    Still, I would feel like a phony if I put something on the internet called 'Declan's blog' but it was really written by my cat (or whoever).

    By Blogger Declan, at 6:19 PM  

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