(Originally written for my MovableType blog and consolidated here.)

Christopher Lydon has written a wonderful post about his interview with Joe Trippi. (http://www.bopnews.com/archives/000017.html#000017)

One of the questions that Lydon asks is, What makes him so sure, I asked, that George W. Bush is not "bloggable"?

Part of the answer comes as The other Republican handicap on the Internet, in the Trippi view, is that Bush and Rove have not even begun to unlearn the ancient rules of campaign command and control

This comes back to Trippi's comments in the old Dean Blogspot blog last May. In "The Perfect Storm" (The third entry in the archive), he writes:

Campaigns abhor chaos -- and to most campaigns built on the old top-down model -- that is what the net represents -- chaos. And the more the campaign tries to control the "chaos" the more it stiffles its growth

(There is much more in that great post, and I always encourage people go back and read it).

This gets to the real reason Bush is not bloggable. The Dean Blog encourages comments and Trackbacks. The Bush blog doesn't allow either.

Clark's blog appears to have moved to Scoop, which doesn't permit trackbacks and is a bit more 'controled'. The same applies to the Edwards blog.

It will be interesting to watch what level of commenting and linking is optimal for campaigns.