| During the recent hoopla over Deval Patrick's role in Ameriquest, the following not very nice comment appeared in response to my post calling for Patrick to step down from the board of Ameriquest's parent company:
Amen
Patrick should resign, you're right. But you're wrong on all the reasons. The guy is a fraud and he's sitting on the board of a company that has preyed on the people of Massachusetts for its own gain.
Now that people like Tom Reilly have stepped in, their business model is failing - i.e., taking advantage of the little guy.
Patrick ought to resign in shame, not in triumph.
by: johd @ May 03, 2006 at 16:19:38 EST
Now, it wouldn't surprise anyone to learn that the anonymous "johd" is a Reilly supporter - after all, he says so right in his comment. But I was somewhat surprised to learn that johd's comment was posted from the IP address of the Tom Reilly Committee.
How do we know this? Well, the database that logs comments at BMG shows that the comment in question came from IP address 68.236.107.242 (you can see a screenshot from the database here - the image is too wide to post here without screwing up everyone's browser window). And here is a screenshot with some more information about that IP address:
Looks like a match to me. (By the way, I searched the database for comments from Patrick headquarters, but I didn't find any. We're not being anti-Reilly here - we're just posting the information that we have.)
It seemed only fair to check in with the Reilly campaign before publishing this post, so I called Corey Welford, Reilly's campaign spokesman. After looking into it, Welford called me back and confirmed that the comment in question did indeed originate at Reilly HQ. According to Welford, the comment was not posted by a staffer, but by a volunteer "who got carried away." Welford emphasized that the comment "was not authorized by the campaign," and said that the problem will be addressed.
There are a couple of lessons here. First, as we specifically said a couple of months ago, people connected with campaigns are more than welcome to post here, as long as they disclose the connection. But we consider the use of anonymous accounts by persons affiliated with campaigns to level attacks at other candidates to be dirty pool, and if we find out about it, we'll publish it. Second, if you didn't know this already, you should know it now: there really is no such thing as true anonymity on the internet. IP addresses (among other things) are routinely tracked by practically every site you visit, and they probably know more about you than you think. Third, anonymous comments like johd's, though obviously designed to help one candidate and harm another, generally accomplish the exact opposite. Rhetoric like that posted by johd doesn't convince anyone of anything, and it creates the possibility of embarrassment for the candidate that the writer is backing.
It's probably to some degree inevitable that blogs like this one will be used by campaign operatives as a means of saying things about other candidates that they would never say for attribution. That's unfortunate, because we really want this to be a place that adds to, rather than detracts from, the quality of political discourse around here. So we'll say it again: if you're affiliated with a campaign, please join in the conversation and say what you want to say - but loudly and proudly tell us who you are before you say it. |
