The past few years have seen an awful lot of angry citizens taking government into their own hands — including recalling local officials. Some of this is clear payback by wealthy constituents (the recent Miami mayoral recall), and others are focused on officials who campaigned on one thing and did another. The U.S. Conference of Mayors seems to be blaming bloggers for this recall fever:
At a news conference Tuesday, Cochran identified one enemy of the mayors: bloggers who attack elected officials.
“Today we have the social media,” he said. “The bloggers are out there every night and every day.”
Cochran said he’d urge mayors to fight back against the blogs and check the laws that regulated recall elections. He said 38 states allowed the recall of local officials, though some required specific reasons such as malfeasance or corruption.
The mayors noted that there were some common factors in the recall efforts, including the targeting of mayors who have raised taxes or slashed budgets.
These mayors have produced a documentary — Recall Fever, that has its own trailer:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwXfNzMp_ig[/youtube]
The number of recall efforts seems to be on the rise. Whether or not these efforts have any merit, I don’t know. But officials blaming bloggers for their current woes is overkill — and taken with the fact that they made their own documentary about this business signals to me that we are going to be looking at a great deal of effort in the next few years to sharply curtail voter’s access to the tools make their displeasure heard.