Using your blog to get out a bad story...

Mike McGavick, GOP candidate for US Senate in Washington, has hit on an interesting strategy: Using your campaign blog to disclose unflattering information about yourself.

After all, the folks who regularly read your blog are your supporters - they love you, and they're likely to pepper the site with forgiving comments. Also, by releasing it on the blog it becomes "old news" to the media -- even though most of the public won't have read it.

From National Journal's Beltway Blogroll:

Some politicians are starting to get it, though, and Republican Mike McGavick, a Senate candidate in Washington state, is among them. He scored some points in the transparency department this week by posting a puportedly tell-all blog entry that details his failures in life -- a marriage that ended in divorce, his subsequent role as "part-time dad," his arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol, his role in running an attack political advertisement, and his difficult decision to lay off employees at the Safeco insurance company.

Of course, as with all tell-all mea-culpas, there's one looming risk. The other shoe. From right-wing blog Real Clear Politics:

The only way this can hurt McGavick is if there is something else in his background that turns up between now and November 7. Then, having gone out of his way to confess to voters "the worst and most embarrassing moments" of his life, McGavick would look doubly bad - and he would pay for it dearly at the polls.

Even when the media completely understand it, the tactic works. From the Beltway Blogroll:

Seattle Times political reporter David Postman, on the other hand, proved that most journalists just can't help but be cynical. At his own blog, Postman suggested that McGavick chose to make his confession by blog rather than to the press because he wanted a "softer opening" to the story and that he downplayed the only "unreported" news -- the DUI arrest -- by putting it second in the list of mistakes.

Note that Postman ran with it on his blog, not a full-blown print expose - as you'd normally get from a DUI revelation. Read the Seattle Times editorial.