What this blog will be for the 2008 election season

I was reading a Salon piece about a blogger who refused to blog for the Edwards campaign. I imagine you heard about the brouhaha around Amanda Marcotte, who was, quite briefly, an Edwards campaign blogger.

In parallel, I had to fill out the Shutesbury town listing for our household, which includes a line about “Occupation,” which stopped me cold. What is my occupation, really? I'm not a student as of December. I'm not really a technology consultant anymore (more on that in a future post). I'm opening myself up to think much more about working with people either individually or in groups in spiritual capacities. I'm wanting to do a lot more writing. I coordinate NOSI, but I'm not sure how to categorize that work (nonprofit management? cat herding? preaching?) Surprisingly, I applied for a “real” job (more on that too, in a future post.) So, I put down “blogger.” (I imagine the Shutesbury town person is going to have a laugh at that one.)

Actually, there are increasing numbers of people who are, for their livelihoods, bloggers. The line between journalism and blogging is getting thinner.  I've never actually made any money blogging (although I am considering putting a 'tip jar' on my blogs), but I guess, at this moment in time, it's as much my “occupation” as anything else I'm doing.

So what are my plans for the coming presidential election? I've never been a purely political blogger. And I've also never been a pure partisan. I have almost always voted Democratic (when I didn't, it was Green, or Democratic Socialist, or some such.) The democratic primary is always way more interesting than the actual election - because at least there are often some candidates in the primary that are much closer to my perspective than the final nominee is. As a progressive faith blogger, I'm going to try and weave in the issues that are important to me, and the ways that the candidates address (or, much more often, don't address) the issues that are important to me. I also want to talk about what's not being talked about. How the candidates never really talk about what really is at issue.

I hope it will be fun, and informative, and will give you a little different spin on the candidates and the election process than what you'll find elsewhere. Anyway, my first post on the Democratic candidates is coming up soon...

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