Have Bloggers Turned Against Hillary? — May 11th 2007

By Karina Longworth

That's the query posed by this story from Politico.com, submitted this morning by Netscape Scout Tim A. Loftis. The most damaging quote in the story comes from none other than the most visible female in the political blogosphere, Arianna Huffington. "Hillary Clinton's problem with the blogosphere is that she has been so calculating that you can smell it," Huffington told Politico's Sam Stein. "Every thought has been processed through multiple channels in her and her consultants' brains. It's so fabricated."

One thing that could be hurting Hillary is her sheer visibility. Good bloggers thrive on making discoveries just off the mainstream radar, and no current candidate has been on the radar for longer than Hillary Clinton. Case in point: the number one search term on Technorati for the past couple of days has been Ron Paul:


The Republican candidate (who ran for President under the Libertarian banner in 1998) likely impressed bloggers at last week's debate with his traditional fiscal conservatism and opposition to the Iraq War. Over the past week, Paul's official YouTube page has outpaced those of his Republican rivals, with 2,199 subscribers to Mitt Romney's 1,899.

The Politico piece is specifically concerned with the upswing of anti-Hillary sentiment. But perhaps a bigger issue is the fact that, according to Technorati, the overall number of mentions of the female candidate by bloggers is on the downswing:


So for today, Paul is up and Clinton is down. But it's best to remember that bloggers are fickle. It's early enough in the race that we'll almost certainly see a Ron Paul backlash, and a backlash to the Hillary backlash, before the first primary.

Tags: bloggers, blogs, hillary clinton, HillaryClinton, politico, politics, ron paul, RonPaul, technorati

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