John McCain's longstanding political reputation is that of a political maverick, an unconventional Republican who is willing to lean across the party aisle to achieve a public policy goal.

It seems that his campaign team is trying to extend that approach online. The McCain campaign in late May launched a new blogger outreach section on its website that encourages supporters to lobby for their candidate across 94 blogs that range in political bent from far left to far right.

The campaign arms the blog-raiders with one of McCain's speeches on the need to transcend partisan politics to deal with the problems that the nation faces.

The strategy reinforces the central role that blogs have come to play in shaping and framing the issues in the 2008 presidential election. The question is whether sending supporters to do grassroots lobbying in the comments section of activist blogs like DailyKos, whose membership is dedicated to defeating the Republicans in the general election, will really benefit McCain's campaign.

"I find it hilarious that McCain's campaign thinks that some astroturf copy-and-paste comments would do anything more than spark some vicious mocking," says Markos Moulitsas, founder of DailyKos, which is currently highlighted as one of three "featured blogs" on McCain's site.

On Memorial Day weekend for example, someone named "Jerry A" posted a news story in an open thread on DailyKos about McCain inviting Barack Obama to visit "post surge" Iraq. At the time,

Republicans had launched a publicity campaign criticizing Obama for formulating Iraq policy without having visited the country for two years.

Four minutes later, "Cultural Worker" responded: "Thank you for sharing McCain's talking points of the day. Again."

Jerry tried to explain that he was just innocently posting a news article, but then another Kos user weighed in and asked why Jerry had received 23 troll ratings out of his 25 postings at the site.

Several comments later, Jerry was outed.

"Jerry A is one of the newly-recruited McCain trolls," wrote "Sarah Lee."

Moulitsas, DailyKos' founder, says that Jerry is a rarity – Moulitsas hasn't seen many posts lobbying for McCain on his site."I can't believe someone actually wasted time and donor money putting together a 'feature' that is so guaranteed to be useless that even his supporters are ignoring it," he says. "Of course, it would help if their daily talking points were updated, you know, daily.

So far, this page has been up for a couple of weeks, and the talking points haven't been changed once."

But David All, a Republican Web 2.0 consultant, and co-founder of

Slatecard, an online political action committee, defended the strategy. He calls it "smart" and

"unique."

"He's got the most comprehensive blogger outreach strategy, and this is just an evolution of that," he argues.

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