This post also appears on the wonderful site techPresident, much thanks to Joshua Levy

Did you read the blog post on the candidate Web site where the blogger gushed over the candidate and outlined the talking points of the campaign? So did I, over and over and over again. I have to be honest, I follow a lot of blogs but I almost never read the blog sections of the candidate’s sites. I cannot imagine most of you do either.

At the very start of this campaign I really railed against the idea of hiring external bloggers. I get the idea. Speechwriters could write for the candidate blogs just as they write for the stump but I understand we are Web 2.0 and that wouldn’t be good enough. We want something personal! So instead of reading a speechwriter veiled as a candidate we are treated to the writing of interns, guest posters & full-time bloggers who try to tell us the candidates story through their story, which is immensely uninteresting and distancing and just sounds like rampant cheerleading.

When I look at the candidate’s blogs I don’t see speechwriting. Instead I see public relations. The average candidate blog post is the following:

I {saw, witnessed, was with} CANDIDATE in {Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina} and it was an {amazing, awe-inspiring, wonderful} time. My {pictures, videos, text messages} are here.

I was particularly struck when CANDIDATE discussed {health care, tort reform, flat tax, abortion, guns, labor unions, lobbying} and made an amazing point. There was a {man, woman} there with an amazingly personal story and I will always remember them. I am so grateful that I am part of this campaign and hope that when CANDIDATE wins and becomes President in 2009 they will follow-up on this issue.

The problem with these blogs isn’t entirely the fault of the bloggers but the premise, which is you take a bunch of people and have them write positively about a campaign. There is no excitement there, no room to grow, no running dialogue other than, candidate is good, candidate is good, candidate is good, vote.

Don’t get me wrong I want to see bloggers get work. I also would LOVE an inside track into the race. I would love to get a sense of what it sounds like and feels like on the ‘inside’. I would love reality TV in a blog, not canned thoughts and comment like we have now.

Frankly I also don’t care what a staffer for the Obama or Clinton campaign’s policy views are. I imagine they believe what the candidate believes, which is why they are with the campaign. I am not voting for the blogger. Same goes for the guest-posts of people talking about why they are voting for the candidate. It isn’t interesting.

There is only one blog I regularly look at, Fred Thompson’s. Now for all I know that is written by a team of speechwriters or bloggers. It says it comes from Fred Thompson’s own hands though, reads like it does and because of that he is 100% accountable for what is written on the page. If he writes a blog post entitled ‘Fifty-Two Reasons We Should Nuke the Moon & Hawaii’, he cannot just pass it off as misinterpreted or some other persons idea.

Blogging to me is an intensely personal thing. It is a writer using a medium to connect with people, to share thoughts, facts, opinions, and in some ways a stream of consciousness which points to music, art, literature, moving pictures and sounds that the author comes in contact with in their daily lives. Bloggers are reporters and are also personalities we connect with, grow with, get to know. Blogs are an awesome tool for a candidate to reach out to people but from what I have seen few if any are really utilizing them.