Friday Morning with Temple Part 2 of 2

Part 1 of the interview is here.

Justene: Did Polstate have any connection to the Daschle-Thune campaign?

Temple: Our connection was extremely tenuous and I didn't really recognize it until much later. Jon Lauck in May 2004 asked to be a contributor for South Dakota and I said, yes. He posted twice and you can see those posts here. I remember saying to him that he could post longer as his efforts were more a little blurb and "You can read more here at my site ... " which isn't what PolState is about.

James Barber, then one of our other contributors first made the connection about whether he was working as a lawyer for Thune. We don't want people who are paid by candidates to write for us. We have made exceptions if they are party volunteers, because as indicated on the front page every single time it comes up, there is a party affiliation listed. But being for a party is different from being a paid spokesman for a candidate; there's a 99 percent certainty that you will ONLY get spin in their favor. Looking back that was clearly what Lauck was doing. In short, I felt used and it was a moment of caution. I mentioned earlier that I was thinking of adding more guidelines to contributors - but its hard because it's free.

Temple: As it turns out Lauck went beyond being a lawyer to a paid shill for Thune. He wasn't ever going to write anything but spin. See his entry - Herseth victory hurts Daschle.

Justene: How did you find out he was a paid shill?

Temple: How did I find out? Well just the blogosphere conversation later and then I looked up the FEC filing reports for myself. He was paid something like $27,000 to blog and be a part of Thune's PR basically.

Justene: So the eventual fallout related to his blog only and not the PolState posts specifically?

Temple: Right. I've never heard PolState mentioned in connection except at the PolState Yahoo group - and then only briefly. It was more a lesson for the future. Frankly we're lucky, he could have contributed more and polluted our site more but he had bigger fish to fry ... I guess.

Justene:There was an article recently in American Prospect that was picked up by ABCNews.com and heavily blogged. If you believe the writer’s position, bloggers have moved from guys in their pajamas to a nefarious force in American politics. You have at PolState political contributors from almost every state and at least this one incident. Would you agree with the American Prospect article in whole or in part?

Article Author: Justene Adamec

Justene practices law in downtown LA. To chat about this or other topics, IM Justene.

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