[I stopped working for the Brunner campaign, so this is just my unpaid position. I only mention it before a bunch of idiots thought this was paid for by the Brunner campaign.]
Premise 1: Lee Fisher has been hounding ODP Chairman Chris Redfern and the members of the ODP Executive Committee individually for over a year to get them to endorse him over Jennifer Brunner.
Premise 2: These folks have surely gotten tired of hearing about this.
Premise 3: Lee surely wouldn’t ask for an ODP endorsement unless he believed he obtained the necessary commitments that he’d likely get the endorsement.
Premise 4: In past ODP Chair races, ODP Committee Members are legendary for privately committing to more than one candidate.
Premise 5: The predominant assumption has been that ODP’s Executive Committee would only endorse if it’s perceived that Brunner’s candidacy is a lost cause but causing Fisher lasting damage that would complicate his chances in the general election.
There’s so many thoughts I don’t even know where to begin…
Let’s start with the last premise. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that if the status quo had been maintained and Fisher defeated Brunner, things were shaping up that there’d likely be very little bad blood caused by the race.
I can’t imagine how Jennifer Brunner could do anything to cause more lasting damage among the Democratic base in the next six weeks to Lee Fisher than Lee Fisher did by provoking this endorsement issue now.
From an objective rational standpoint, I simply fail to see the political calculus for the Fisher campaign’s move. Where in the cost-benefit analysis of this decision result in a net upside for Fisher?
By provoking this endorsement process, Fisher now has creating a rally point for Brunner supporters who have been desperately looking for … a rally point.
With less than two weeks to early voting and less than six weeks to the primary, I question whether the Executive Committee is really going to be able to: 1) appoint a screening committee, 2) have that committee evaluate the candidates, and 3) have a second Executive Committee meeting to approve the screening committee’s recommendation before votes start being cast. What’s the point of getting an ODP endorsement after the voting has started?
And that’s if they’re motivated to lift heaven and earth to make this happen. The Executive Committee next week could agree to consider an endorsement, but not appoint a screening committee to meet until… well, how’s June look for you, Lee?
Beyond a cheaper stamp, what would an ODP endorsement at this point give Fisher’s campaign that outweighs the obvious and palpable resentment such a heavy-handed approach engenders?
And why would the Executive Committee go along with it? After all, after blissfully sitting on the sidelines and actively seeking to keep the county parties out of the game, too, why would ODP want to weigh in in the fourth quarter? What has happened since December that would suddenly give Fisher the votes to make this endorsement happen?
It’s not like Jennifer Brunner’s lighting up the airways with savage attack ads on Lee Fisher that’s going to cause lasting damage (or ever will be able to).
Ordinarily, these endorsements were used PRE-FILING deadline to discourage an opponent out of a race. I cannot remember ODP issuing an endorsement in a contested primary this late in the game. And given the timing, I question what positive impact an ODP endorsement would give the Fisher campaign.
Which leads me to the third and fourth premise, what if Fisher is wrong and he doesn’t get the endorsement? What’s the potential downside there?
And this all occurs under this backdrop: it’s widely believed that the recently touted DSCC poll in the race also polled the head-to-head primary matchup… but the results of those numbers are not being released by either the DSCC, which has thrown its weight solidly behind Fisher, or the Fisher campaign. (Brunner’s campaign does not have access to the full and raw DSCC poll data.)
And what great pro-Fisher data did the DSCC release? That Lee polls below 40% with an insignificant one-point lead against Rob Portman in the general election. That’s the data they did choose to make public. The Titanic looked more unsinkable.
So, this all leaves me with two questions:
- After all this time, why would the ODP Executive Committee now decide to go with an endorsement?
- And, conversely, why would Lee suddenly be forcing the issue after all this time?
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Dispatch journalist/WBNS reporters still not willing to report already established facts about "Troopergate"
by ModernEsquire on March 18, 2010 · Comments
At what point does the Dispatch lose all journalistic credibility?
The entire “bust” at the Governor’s Mansion started by a letter intercepted by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections written by an inmate to his wife. Nobody disputes this.
According to my sources familiar with the letter (i.e. people who actually have SEEN the document), the letter refers to the contraband as a “six pack” and even discussed the price he obtain for getting the item in the prison.
At the time, officials at the DRC informed the Highway Patrol investigating the matter that the term “six pack” is commonly used code word by inmates for… tobacco cigarettes. I’ve been told that no less than the then DIRECTOR of the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections told the Patrol that the term and the price mentioned indicated that the item could only be tobacco cigarettes, and not drugs.
Nonetheless, some mid-level managers in the Patrol insisted that the item might be drugs even though there was no evidence to support the conclusion.
So pervasive was the perception that the contraband in question was likely tobacco and not drugs, that even the mid-level Patrol managers who were pushing to do the “bust” detailed in their plan that the first priority upon seeing the inmate’s wife making the planned drop (even though those same officers conceded that there was also a strong likelihood that the intercepted communication never even made it to the inmate’s wife) was to first determine if the item was, in fact, criminally illegal contraband. A fact that neither the Dispatch or WBNS has reported in their news stories despite the fact that the Dispatch published e-mails on their website that they’ve received pursuant to a public records request that confirms this (see pg. 9).
Even worse, a WBNS reporter actually used an image of the inmate’s letter in a news story last night, but never mentioned that the terms used in it led almost every investigator involved to conclude that there was a strong probability that any stop of the woman would be illegal as there was no criminal conspiracy as the suspected “contraband” was likely tobacco cigarettes.
In fact, the WBNS reporter did not even ACKNOWLEDGE what even the Dispatch has admitted– that the item was likely tobacco and a big reason the “raid” was scrubbed was that it was more likely than the raid itself was illegal than the suspected contraband.
Furthermore, neither the Dispatch, nor WBNS has reported that the organization representing the rank-and-file of the Ohio Highway Patrol has been decrying the politicization of this “bust” by the very mid-level Highway Patrol managers involved who are upset over the Governor’s most recent appointment to Superintendent of the Patrol–something that the Dispatch’s editors have also attempted to castigate at the time.
I’m awaiting further documentation, but I’ve been told that instead of being reassigned for political retribution (as the Dispatch’s media empire has reported) over the thwarted cigarette raid at the Governor’s Mansion, one of the officers involved was being reassigned due to disciplinary misconduct entirely unrelated to the situation at the Governor’s Mansion. Again, a fact easily ascertainable by a public records request (mine is pending) that the Dispatch organizations would ordinarily examine if they were interested in reporting the full facts of this story.
And what’s worse, here’s an actual quote from the Senate Republican seeking to use his Committee gavel to politicize the issue further as reported by… you guess it, WBNS:
“Here’s what I believe is part of a cover-up to an unwarranted and unnecessary criminal investigation that should have been allowed to have been completed.” State Sen. Tim Grendell.
Not even Chairman Grendell can blast the Strickland Administration without admitting that “bust” was an unwarranted and unnecessary criminal investigation!
So ridiculous has the situation has gotten than no less than the editorial board of the Cleveland Plain Dealer– a frequent critic of Governor Strickland (more so than even the Dispatch)– has decried the politicization by Republicans and former Patrol managers as being more about settling political scores than anything dealing with genuine law enforcement concerns:
If the Dispatch wishes to be taken seriously as anything other than a Republican propaganda machine, it will end this deliberate and irresponsible cherry picking of the facts and just report the news, the whole news, and nothing but the news. Something the Dispatch has demonstrated a systematic allergic reaction to doing in this instance.
If they won’t do it, I, or someone who actually gets paid to do this for a living, will.
As they say, DEVELOPING…
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