By Tim Russo

On February 18, 2008, if you only got your news in ink, on TV, or the radio, you would have learned that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher had both announced to run for the US Senate in a Democratic Party primary in May, 2010. 

Ho.  Hum. 

If that’s where you got your news, you missed the entire story.

February 17, 2008, became a chaotic struggle by the Lee Fisher campaign to meet old media deadlines in order to get a headline.  Why?  Because Jennifer Brunner announced first, that morning, online, in a Youtube video. Bloggers were on top of it, linking to the video, embedding it into their blogs, and applauding the use of campaign techniques now prerequisite in the Democratic Party thanks to Barack Obama’s groundbreaking campaign.

Caught flat-footed and unprepared, the Fisher campaign’s circus effort to cobble together what they called a “long planned” announcement was documented every step of the way by Ohio bloggers with ears to the ground.  Tales of elected officials being hounded by Fisher’s camp to drive to Columbus from all parts of the state to show support, were met with howls of laughter.  Bloggers dug for tips on who would endorse, how they got to the announcement, and where it might be.  By the end of the day, after blogs mercilessly mocked the Fisher campaign for incompetence, Lee Fisher was a very angry man.

How do we know Lee Fisher was angry?  Because a few weeks later, Fisher gave a video interview to blogger Nick DeCenzo from Buckeye State Blog (BSB), noting dryly that “the first 10 days of this campaign will be a distant memory.”  Wishful thinking, that.

Thus began the next instance in which blogs ruled Lee Fisher’s world.

Turns out DeCenzo sat on the interview for over a week before posting the Youtube onto BSB in early March. After a day of blogs wondering aloud how anyone worth their salt would sit on an exclusive interview for so long, DeCenzo admitted that he did so because the Fisher campaign wanted to review it and approve the editing.  BSB exploded the next day - a front-page writer resigned, DeCenzo then resigned, himself, and Lee Fisher spent another week being mocked. 

Welcome to the blogger age of Ohio politics. 

Blogs played increasingly important roles in statewide campaigns in Ohio during the 2006 US Senate primary between Paul Hackett and Sherrod Brown.  Much ink has been spent on the drama between blogs, Brown, and Brown’s wife, Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz.  But the lesson for campaigns from the drama was unmistakable. 

In Democratic primaries in Ohio, blogs are not new media, or citizen media, or internet media.  Blogs are the media.  Ignore them at your peril.

The traditional media environment in which US Senate campaigns are conducted, in particular long campaigns, has devolved into a laughingstock. Newspapers dip into the race maybe once a week, maybe once a month, marking the calendar of fundraising reports, and occasionally biting on scandalous “tips” from opposing campaigns.  It’s a game campaigns know well and have mastered, leaving voters completely empty of real information about either campaign.

Blogs cover such campaigns constantly.  Every day.  Multiple times an hour.  They are written by activists with keyboards and video cameras, people who care deeply about politics, who devour political news on the internet by the minute, and have a lot of opinions they are not shy about expressing.  It is a 24/7/365 treadmill. 

Blogs fill a gaping void with information about candidates and the campaigns available to anyone with an internet connection. Google a candidate’s name, and you’ll find most of the current news about them appears on blogs written by local activists. Not some journalist sitting at a desk in New York.

The problem for campaigns is this constancy. In the old world, a campaign knew the rules, knew the deadlines, the cycles, knew the reporters and what they would bite on. A campaign could ride out a bad story, or pitch a positive one, within understood boundaries of time and ground rules. It kept the campaign’s media strategy predictable, and thus easy to implement.

The first crack in this paradigm in Ohio appeared in 2006, as blogs became a ground zero of dirty politics.  Rather than embrace the new technology and the environment it created, Sherrod Brown’s primary campaign attacked it. But because the 2006 primary was relatively short, and Paul Hackett dropped out early, the blog dynamic never got a chance to take hold.

In the 2010 US Senate primary, the blog dynamic is already in full control, ten months from Election Day. One week in July is illustrative.

The latest blog-driven story revolves around potential tax snooping by the Lee Fisher campaign into the family of Jennifer Brunner. In a series of strange articles during one week in July, Plain Dealer reporter Mark Naymik found an interest in the tax record of Brunner’s 22-year-old son, Jonathon, her husband Rick, and her husband’s business. All the issues were already resolved, some of them years ago. 

Bloggers called foul, wondering aloud, as bloggers always do, why a reporter at a Cleveland newspaper would suddenly find interest in tax issues in Columbus regarding a candidate’s family. More importantly, blogs asked questions about how that reporter got tax information buried deep in state-held archives as long as eleven years ago.

Thus Mark Naymik was now in the crosshairs and the only people bloggers like to smack around more than politicians who ignore them are reporters. Blogs badgered Naymik for days as each of his stories got fishier and fishier. Naymik’s biggest blunder was claiming that Rick Brunner’s business failed to file necessary tax documents in 1998 and 2001, which justified his tax status being revoked by the Ohio Department of Taxation in May, 2008. This failure to file was proven false, as Brunner’s campaign produced the necessary documents, after which the Ohio Tax Department magically restored Rick Brunner’s tax status.

It soon emerged, and Naymik later admitted in a column, that he received the tax information from what he called “Fisher supporters”. 

Blogs have been in overdrive ever since, calling for an investigation by the inspector general into the sort of tax snooping that cost another Ohio Department of Tax staffer their job last fall when something similar happened with Joe The Plumber.  As of this article, the issue is unresolved, but the Fisher campaign has alternatively refused comment, called the idea “baseless”, and a “conspiracy theory,”. However, they have not denied the campaign had anything to do with the tax snooping.

None of this ever would have happened absent a blogosphere in Ohio that is vibrant, engaged, and vigilant.  Blogs at their best are like white blood cells on a virus– they swarm, attach, and do not stop until truth emerges. 

Which might be why, after numerous bloggers in Ohio wondered about Lee Fisher’s public schedule, and where they could find Lee Fisher to ask him about the tax snooping, Lee inexplicably decided not to attend President Barack Obama’s town hall meeting in his home town of Shaker Heights, July 23, literally a few blocks from his own home.

Blogs might even be why a few days later, on July 27, Rick Brunner filed a complaint with the Ohio Inspector General asking for an investigation into the tax snooping.

The new boss ain’t the old boss.  Not anymore.

Tim Russo is the editor of BloggerInterrupted and can be found biting back everyday on his blog.