As the very first commenter said in the comments thread:
David you put "too liberal" in quotes as if Hackett were the one who said it. But Jim Provance is the one who says it. In fact, of all the quotes Provance provides from Hackett, none of them even mention Brown. Contrast that with the Brown quotes, which specifically single out Hackett for ridicule.
The only thing I get out of this Toledo Blade piece is that Hackett thinks he'll do a better job of winning over independent and conservative voters. While that doesn't exactly comfort me, it's hardly an attack on Brown. Am I wrong?
Here's the deal, David Sirota (and I won't even go into your lies about Hackett's positions -- anyone who wants to see them can go to Paul Hackett's website and see that you're lying about them, too):
Brown thinks he can win Ohio by winning Cleveland and the other big cities and writing off the rest of the state. Well, that didn't work for him in 1990 -- back when Ohio was a lot more Democratic than it is now. (Oh, yeah, and the Republican who beat him was none other than Bob Taft III, who's currently at 15% in the polls right now.) It didn't work for John Kerry last year, as we all know. What makes you think it'll work now?
Brown has two (2) things going for him, electability-wise: The $2 million he's saved up over the past decade and a half, and the backing of the big union chiefs. Let's look at these two things:
- While $2 million is nothing to sneeze at, the Ohio Senatorial race will cost the Democrats a minimum of five times that -- and more likely ten, if they want to be sure. So the money it took Brown fifteen years to get won't go very far. Plus, Paul Hackett was able -- with only the backing of the lefty half of the blogosphere -- to rake in over half a million in less than a month, before the national Democratic party deigned to provide any assistance.
- It's not 1950 any more. Union members don't always -- or even often -- vote the way their union heads say they should. Especially in Ohio, as a recent Mother Jones article showed.
I'd like the Brown backers a lot more if they would actually tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, every once in a while. But I've yet to the most prominent Brown backers in the blogosphere make a case for Brown that didn't involve making deceptive insinuations -- or, as in this case, outright lies -- about Paul Hackett.
[UPDATE: As Majikthise notes, Sirota has a history of bizarre, over-the-top, and not-quite-truthful (to say the least) attacks against Paul Hackett. I wish I could give Sirota the benefit of the doubt on this piece, but his past history on Hackett makes that impossible.]
[UPDATE #2: Sirota's blog posts not only attack Hackett, but they even slime friends of Sirota's who back Hackett, such as Bob Brigham. Charming.]
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