House Speaker Dennis Hastert has a blog. Now, if only he had a personality.
It’s nice to see politicians dipping their pinky toes into the blogosphere, I guess. And Hastert (or, more likely, his ghostwriter) does try to show that he gets it. He writes, “The internet is changing the way we share information. My office has been talking a lot about some of the conversations going on in blogosphere. So I thought, hey, I should start one and give you unfiltered updates on Capitol Hill.”
But for this politician, “sharing information” really just means “a new way for us to get our message out.”
As my friend David Weinberger once memorably shouted,”I am a citizen and a voter. I flee from ‘message.’ It is advertising. I want to avoid advertising!”
Speaker Hastert’s spokesman, Ron Bonjean, seems equally clueless about the blogosphere. “Blogging is the new talk radio,” he told the Christian Science Monitor. “People listen to talk radio because the mainstream media is too liberal for them. It makes sense for the Speaker to get the Republican message out to them.”
Blogging is the end of “talking to” and the beginning of “talking with,” guys. Try pushing a string, instead.