Personally I'm really sick of the presidential primary starting so damn early causing almost the entire blogosphere to focus most of its attention on it instead of actually getting shit done.

is almost all to herself, so it really shouldn't be considered a factor.

One of her get out of jail free cards has been that she's been able to lend herself money whenever the GOP wells have run dry.

I would have to agree that the Sherrod Brown Senate primary ads were effective, even if in a somewhat devious, welcome to the NFL kinda way.  

The Brown campaign was sitting on a nice war chest. They main goal in the primary wasn't to raise money, but instead to keep Hackett from raising enough to make any TV buys. Brown's connections in the House strong armed the influential old school money, while Brown's online efforts focused on shutting down Hackett's web buzz powered fundraising base.

The line of wait until the primaries over was an effective passive aggressive marketing effort. Online pro-Brown pundits dutifully cited the ads as an example of their Hackett mean / Brown nice mantra.

I'm not a big fan of online political ads, but that's about as good as it's going to get in my opinion.

Tim, thanks for posting this. This is very significant stuff.

Matt,

I don't buy your methodology. Have you used it before? Can you compare a grassroots driven Presidential candidate to one that's "driven from the top"?

If you ask me you'll see patterns like this for every celebrity. One of the weaknesses of the blogosphere is that it is primarily reactionary to the MSM. In my opinion it is not valid to use this as a critique of any one political candidate.

As a footnote I provide a meta-page that I created for Senator Obama's visit to Ohio this year for the ODP dinner.

http://blog.oh02.com/2006/06/05/odp-dinn er-meta-page/

I've never seen such intense local grassroots coverage as that day. Interestingly enough, the MSM coverage of the day was primary focused on a counter event of Black Republicans that Ken Blackwell set up for the same day.

Like? What are we, in high school? What does like have to do with it?

I'd definitely like to see Ryan get a higher profile. He's the perfect politician for the YouTube age. I'd love to see him go against Voinovich in 2010. Hopefully he can patch things up with Sherrod Brown.

OK, I grant you that it's a long shot, but man... what happened in Indiana was amazing.

To me the simple question of backing Emanuel is how good were his targets in 06. From what I've seen they spent a lot of money in the wrong places and left a lot of other hangers right on the edge. When you miss that many pitches over the plate that's not justification for another turn at bat no matter how good your team does in the playoffs.

Maybe I'm just bitter about OH-02 being so close and them now having to fundraise for lawyers and recounts. Call me crazy but running hard against Mean Jean Schmidt seemed like a no brainer to me. What do I know.

I love Tim Ryan but to be honest with you ever since he backed Paul Hackett in the Senate primary he's been a non factor in terms of the 2006 elections. The House races needed all the backup they could get and I didn't see to much stepping up from anyone except to promote done deal Ted Strickland.

Evan Bayh didn't wait for the DCCC to do the heavy lifting in Indiana. He went to bat for his state and they delivered. I'd nominate Senator Evan Bayh to head the DCCC.

If Sherrod Brown isn't a populist I don't know who is.

Still, I must confess that I cringed whenever I heard him talk about fighting for the "middle class." It sounded too sterile and academic to me. Kerryesque.

I'm sure that the lingo was tested in some human habitrail somewhere with people strapped down twirling dials. The best quess that I can make is that it was chosen so as to dull the edge of his populist message. Talking about fighting for the workers sets off a lot of subliminal warning signs to many people.

Absolutely.

Looking at all of the Senate races the one that seemed the most improbable for a Democratic win was Sherrod Brown. Yet in the end he cleaned Mike DeWine's clock.

It makes more sense to switch Tester on Energy and Brown on Agriculture, since one of the major issues that Brown ran on was energy independence.

She's actually secretly been pushing the idea for a while now. The story has only recently gotten any attention.

Here's our posts on the subject:

http://blog.oh02.com/2006/10/26/jean-sch midts-toxic-legacy/
http://blog.oh02.com/2006/10/29/schmidts -toxic-legacy-ii-the-lies/

From what I'm hearing the DOE has now decided to hold off announcing the winners of the study until after the election. It was supposed to be this week. Funny that.