Hillary Clinton, the blogger, doggers, and a whole boatload of jargon...

People in the UK tend to look at American Politics with a slightly snooty, raised-eyebrows kind of condescension, and let's be honest for us to be so dismissive of the political engine driving the biggest economy in the world is, at best, patronising, and at worst, pig-headedly arrogant.But- and there is indeed quite a "but"- we have to concede that American politics doesnt do itself many favours; and as a simple example, take their President, the erstwhile Mr Bush Jr. Competent and passionate he may be; surrounded by a well-stocked cabinet of political thought he may also be (that's not for this article to comment on, however). Yet as a representative of his nation, he is undoubtedly far from eloquent and hardly a figure of dynamism; when we think of all that is synonymous with the American nation, he doesn't quite seem to fit.

The main focus of this post, however, is another example of US Politics appearing slightly out of kilter. Hillary Clinton's recent recruitment of a leading political blogger, Peter Daou, as part of her "team", presumably in the run up to her seemingly inevitable run at the White House, is on the surface not a bad move. Daou himself has written on his Daou Report that he wishes to "close the triangle"- meaning his perception of the three prongs of mainstream media, the political establishment, and.... here it comes.... "the blogosphere".While it may seem odd for me to write, in a "blog", to criticise the use of the word, I just don't feel it lends any credibility to the man or what he can no doubt bring to the Democratic Party.He calls his mission "joining Senator Clinton’s team as a blog advisor to facilitate and expand her relationship with the netroots". Why must he use such ridiculous, convoluted net-jargon to describe his post- he is now moving into the mainstream media, which may find it hard to take him seriously if he insists on using such language.

We all know what he means, of course. Perhaps he is just a little bit too wrapped up in the "blogosphere" to realise that outside of its keen and committed enthusiasts, such terms aren't going to win him any fans, and indeed I can imagine that some prospective readers of his online missives could be put off by him speaking as though representing an online cult of "bloggers".Maybe in the UK we find a problem with the term "blogger" because of its alphabetical proximity to "dogger"- one who drives to shady spots at night to engage in anonymous sex acts with strangers of a similar disposition. Just a thought.

My main point is this, however; the man is a political consultant. He talks at length on his site about how he tries to fuse the two worlds- the world of the blogger, and the world of the consultant. Is he too stubbornly steeped in his own jargon that he can't call himself Sen. Clinton's "online outreach consultant", or something else that would actually mean something in the real world?Just like President Bush seems slightly incongruous when we look at the nation he is meant to stand for, the idea of a man being drafted into a Presidential Candidate's inner circle using words like "blogosphere" just doesn't sit right.

It either seems like a good idea but wrong choice of man (perhaps Sen. Clinton will take Daou to one side and give him a heads-up that he sounds like a teenage computer games enthusuiast) or a fairly cynical attempt to bring Daou, a well respected man in his field, "on-side".The commendable but sad thing is, you can't help but feet Daou's earnestness in everything he writes.I hope for his sake that he gets to bring his points of view to a whole new crop of "netroots" enthusiasts. I just wish he wouldn't call them that....