John Kerry’s campaign train passes a planned stop in Kansas, and the apology reported by CNN comes not from an interview or press release, but from the campaign blog.

“We raised our hand to wave, but the engineer hadn’t slowed, and by the time we had waved even a little to the signs and cheers and camera flashes, it was dark again,” wrote Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, on the campaign’s Web log. “We sat frustrated, but we knew we were not as frustrated as the people of Lawrence, Kansas.”

Increasingly, the press is turning to blogs as primary sources. And blogs themselves have become the railways of the modern campaign, delivering a personal message directly to voters where they live.
A snub is still a snub, and when hundreds of people show up in real-space after midnight to see you, you shouldn’t whisk by at 19th Century speed. That’s why John Edwards is reportedly going back to Lawrence today to make good on the originally planned apperance.
But a blog offers the same technological power that the whistle-stop offered Harry Truman in 1948, when he used the railway system as a delivery mechanism for wetware handshakes.

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