Is Watertown Mayor Graham’s political blog a good idea?
Watertown Mayor Jeff Graham writes one of the more interesting political blogs in the North Country. He describes it as “a commentary on politics and culture in New York’s North Country region.”
This week, Watertown Daily Times managing editor Bob Gorman blasted Graham for the practice. The problem, Gorman says, is that Graham leaks too much privy information.
Graham wants his blog to be relevant. To do that he needs to write something new. To do that he must reveal something that few others know. To do that he often resorts to passing on info he is privy to as mayor.
It didn’t take long for other politicians to make the connection: Talk to Graham and he will blog about it. The result? The county legislature ignores him and state officials in the Dulles building say as little to him as possible.
Gorman argues that Graham has rendered himself politically irrelevant, but he also says community leaders think Graham uses the website to “frame — that is, mangle — the debate.”
Graham was asked repeatedly about the editorial during his radio show but declined to respond, other than to say, “I’m not going to get into that on these airwaves.”
He added, “I really don’t care” about Gorman’s “fulminations.”
So what do you think? Is it a good idea for Watertown to have a mayor who is also a blogger?
Tags: politics
I don’t live in the town so the local politics escape me…but, the guy has a great blog and should politics ever escape him, he should continue blogging.
Of course he’s not going to get into in the airwaves. He’s saving it for his blog!
I think he needs to focus on governing the city.
Oh and it’s a crappy blog too. It looks less like a mayor’s blog (which might be moderately interesting) and more like the blog of an ordinary political hack… of which there are already far too many.
i think it’s important to separate out two issues here.
one is whether any mayor should be blogging. personally, i don’t see any problem with that in principle. it can be a nice way to interact with your constituents and give them an insight into their government that would be hard to obtain otherwise. in a way it can be even courageous and laudable, as by allowing rabble-rousers (like myself!) in the comments you can really open yourself up to some criticism.
but the other issue is whether your mayor should be blogging when your mayor is jeff graham. and i’m afraid the answer to that is no. i read his blog every day, and he certainly does have some good posts every now and then. but that’s all far outweighed by the perpetual embarrassment he causes his city by running his blog as a quasi-tabloid with a steady stream of images of scantily-clad women in the sidebar. he’s a complete buffoon.
I just looked at the blog and couldn’t find any scantily clad women. There was a picture of Useless, whoops, I mean Assemblywoman Russell, but I hope to never see her scantily clad. In fact I hope never to see her at all, except as she packs to leave office.
fair enough bret, there aren’t any such pictures right now. and who knows, maybe the mayor has finally come around to realizing that they reflect horribly on him and his city. (let’s just say that, ahem, certain commenters have pointed this out to him in the past.) but he really doesn’t seem to be able to get enough of them. we probably just have to wait till the next time he pops by the tilted kilt or lindsay lohan is in the news.