September 08, 2010 02:39 AM UTC

The Great Website "Buckpedal"

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

Another telling catch, fresh up at the Huffington Post this afternoon:

AFGHANISTAN: In the earlier version of Buck’s website, accessed on May 18, the Senate candidate said that he supports a nation-building effort in Afghanistan that will take “at least 10 years”:

  My son is a third year cadet at West Point. I’m very proud of my son’s decision to serve his country. He understands the risks involved. He also understands there is a price for freedom in this country and he’s willing to stand up and shoulder that burden. For so many of our brave men and women today, that means shouldering the burden in Iraq and Afghanistan.

   We definitely need to continue a major effort in Afghanistan. We are told this effort will take at least 10 years. It will require both military and civilian personnel to help build up the country. The generals on the ground tell us we are likely to be in Afghanistan for the long term with a difficult and complicated mission.

   As Colorado’s Senator, I will always look first to the advice of the generals, and I will strongly support the mission of our troops who are in harm’s way.

Today, his site has no reference to the long occupation of Afghanistan…

And that’s just the beginning, read the whole report by Amanda Terkel–apparently, Buck has made uncomfortable positions on a constitutional anti-abortion amendment and stem cell research disappear too! And in rather stark contrast to the old version of his immigration issue page, apparently Buck doesn’t want immigrants “forced into the shadows” now, which is a good thing since everybody agrees that illegal immigrants should be paying their taxes. It’s worth noting that these edits to Buck’s issue pages don’t necessarily mean Buck’s position has changed; he just doesn’t want to lead off with so much base-pleasing red meat anymore. Which, as we’ve been talking about ever since the primary, seems to be happening an awful lot.

In our many years of exploring the finer points of a good campaign website–usually through the lens of embarrassing failure–we’ve developed a number of helpful rules of thumb: don’t try to do it yourself, make extra-doubly super sure those are Colorado mountains, et cetera.

Add to the list: only put things you won’t regret later on your website. To remove them, especially once people are paying attention to you, only draws more attention to the, uh, “old you.”