June 13, 2007

White House Senate bill outreach: just RedState, The Corner, and Townhall... or?

Continuing the post "Covert White House propaganda for Senate immigration amnesty bill?", we now learn this:

The White House has done outreach to liberal religious and Hispanic groups and, at the suggestion of chief political strategist Karl Rove, made more use of the blogosphere on immigration than it has on any issue since President Bush took office, aides said...

...Aides said it was Rove's idea to focus on blogs. After vetting by policy experts, responses have been posted on a wide range of blogs under the names of Kerrie Rushton and Nicholas Thompson, both associate directors in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, which falls under Rove's domain.

"We had to be nimble," said White House Communications Director Kevin Sullivan, who is coordinating the administration's public relations strategy. "The idea was to not let inaccurate or misleading statements become part of the conventional wisdom."

However, the only sites mentioned in the article are RedState and The Corner, and a search for the two aides' names through technorati and a google blog search doesn't turn up much I could see except references to those two sites. That's especially odd, since the NYT said that the White House said they'd been "posting defenses" on liberal sites, and one would think that the latter would be up in arms. And, of course, two or three sites is not a "wide range".

Unless, of course, there are other sites where they aren't using their real names and disclosing their affiliation. And, it would also be interesting to find out what communication they've had with, just as an example, those bloggers who remain administration stalwarts or at least are encouraging their readers to keep an open mind. It would seem that any such communication would be part of the public record and obtainable through an FOIA request.

UPDATE: To make this clearer, the first link in this post links to a June 3 New York Times article that contained this:

White House officials said [the backlash to their amnesty plan] had led them to engage the blogosphere in a concerted way for the first time, posting defenses on liberal and conservative sites.

Yet, as discussed above I've only seen three possible sites where they've posted defenses, none of them liberal sites. And, if they've been overtly posting defenses on such sites, I'd imagine I would have heard about it. Obviously, both the NYT ("liberal sites") and the Politico ("a wide range of blogs") could have made similar mistakes. Or, something else might be going on. This is, of course, just speculation, but it would be great if someone would look into it.

Posted to Immigration2007a at June 13, 2007 02:38 PM