A Legend Explained

The dry understatement of this profile of HA! Goodman is highly entertaining:

The quirky nature of Goodman’s work makes it almost impossible to assess just how big an impact he actually has. An official with Hillary Clinton’s campaign said he knew his byline but not much more. “Not a big HRC fan I believe,” the official wrote. The Sanders campaign, for its part, doesn’t blast out Goodman’s laudatory columns, as it might if they came from The Washington Post or The New York Times. But an aide there confirmed that they are, at least, aware of and teased by his existence.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to click on a link with a great headline and seen his byline,” said the Sanders aide.

That Goodman even got to this point is a testament to just how democratized the media universe has become.

We also get an inside look at the sausage factory:

Salon editor-in-chief David Daley said his site has passed on some of Goodman’s pieces that felt too one-sided or over-the-top, but described others as “provocative” and said they “move the conversation.”

“I do think a lot of the debate around where Sanders voters will go if he doesn’t get the nomination, and about how stridently some Sanders backers see the policy differences with Clinton, has, in some part, been driven by his pieces and the audience they achieve on social media,” Daley said.

“They certainly generate a lot of engagement and argument,” he added.

And, hey, say what you hill about Ha-Ha Anti-Clinton Goodman, he will not be responsible for the worst hack anti-Clinton argument of February 2016.