Ohio 2nd Blog

Canvassing will be going til dark tonight and starting back up again tomorrow morning. Contact Hackett for Congress (513) 735-4310 to get in on the action.

Action Reports:

• Hackett signs are everywhere. Some good coverage by Schmidt but not as much.
• Calls attacking Hackett are calling him “Tax Hike Hackett” and also talking about his support of gay marriage.
• There’s also work of a robo call going out to Black and rural voters that has a religious theme.
• Flyers are being handed out at some churches calling Hackett a “baby killer”
• Schmidt spoke at Hackett’s church today. (Gutsy move)
• Bishop Brown has out a radio ad from Hackett on 100.9 FM .
• Pastor Lynch and his father have sent out thousand of mailers for Hackett to their contacts.
• A woman started yelling at Hackett’s wife today when she was shopping with her children calling her a “baby killer”.
• One of Hackett’s kids was very upset when she heard about the Washington Post story quoting a White House official saying that they would “bury” him.
• Because of the extra volunteers thousands more people have been contacted about Hackett.
• Some people are expressing exhaustion from the amount of ads on the race. Not directed at any one candidate.

These are all very vague. Sorry I don’t have time to flesh them out more. Also if I make any errors.

Eva Wolkowitz over @ Grow Ohio has up another great post, this time of the Hackett canvass kickoff rally with John Glenn, and Max Cleland.

I’ve also uploaded a bunch more photos over @ the Flickr site.

Too funny.. Hi Gang Mrs. E here filling in while the big guy is on the trail.

I was just reading on Daily Kos that Jean Schmidt has apparently lied…or disremembered ever knowing who Tom Noe is.

But isn’t that a rule of thumb? If you get caught-deny everything. “It wasn’t me” “Do I know you?” ” Coins??? What coins?” “I speaka no engla”

Hey, I even did the link thingy right..hehe

The Cincinnati Enquirer has endorsed Jean Schmidt for Congress. While normally the Enquirer endorsing a Republican would be no surprise, this time around many people were hoping that they might break the rut.

Their big critique of Hackett is how Iraq is such a defining issue in the campaign. From what I’ve been able to get from him it’s a defining issue not because he wants it to be but because that’s all people are talking about. It’s the defining issue of his campaign because it’s the defining issue in America today. Blue or Red people are worried about what’s going on over in Iraq.

I remember trying to get Paul Hackett to talk about Iraq after he won the primary. It was like pulling teeth. He didn’t want to talk about it and you could tell. Jobs, Health Care, Social Security… you bring up Iraq and you’d hit a wall. That’s not the case any more. The yellow ribbons are everywhere. People are desperate for someone that will talk honestly about what’s going on over in Iraq. Republicans won’t, Democrats won’t, Jean Schmidt won’t and the Cincinnati Enquirer won’t. Paul Hackett does.

The Enquirer editorial board has been on electing more women lately. This endorsement would fit that pattern. The most telling part of the endorsement is the picture. That’s the best picture of Jean Schmidt campaigning that I’ve seen, and there are still only a few people with her. Meanwhile Hackett has been out knocking doors with hundreds of people.

I remember Joe Braun after the first debate giving me a hard time about how there weren’t any Schmidt pictures of her campaigning on my site. I said, send them to me… I’ll put them up. I never got one. I figured it would be interesting to see what’s going on from their end of things. Nothing. No excitement. No passionate support. Just the endless mantra that there’s no way that she can lose. High praise indeed.

This would give Schmidt the Enquirer and Community Press and Hackett the Post and Dayton Daily News. The WhistleBlower likes to point out that no one has won the district without the Enquirer’s endorsement. That would be a little more significant if Republicans didn’t so consistently win in the district. Picking Republicans to win isn’t going to get you a high return on your bets here.

This will be a boost to a campaign that has had little good news of late. The question is, will it be enough? That’s up to you, my friends. It’s all about boots on the ground now.

UPDATE: A response from Jean Schmidt’s campaign manager is up in the comments.

UPDATE 2: Ann Driscoll goes to town on the Enquirer. She’s batting .500 with yesterday’s prediction.

• Washington Post > GOP Says It Will ‘Bury’ Name-Calling Candidate
• FEC > Additional $117,680 of attack ads by NRCC
• Tracy Joan @ DKos > Stop the Calls!!!
  There’s always a risk of going over board on this stuff. One call… go vote… that’s fine. I’m totally in the camp of Ohio needs to be won by people from Ohio. Still, when fighting Tom Delay and his crooked cash there’s nothing wrong with a little reinforcements.
• CCW > The Hackett Rally

Also reports of a massive wave of push polls from the Republicans. Vague stuff but it always is. This is the part of the movie where their heads start spinning around in circles and flames shoot out of their mouths.

BTW: I’m about ready to call a time out on the liberal blogosphere. Love you guys… really grateful for your support… but CHILL for a few days. (What are the odds of that happening? We’ve released the hounds and now there’s nothing we can do but sit back and watch as they rip to shreds everything in their path.)

Now back to bed until we can get a copy of the Enquirer. It’s really hard to sleep but I need to.

Jene Galvin makes a good point over @ City Beat.

(via Hullabaloo (via DKos))

TracieLynn @ DKos has photos up of today’s Hackett rally.

Any more out there?

UPDATE: More photos over @ Linda in Cincinnati’s Yahoo! account. (via MyDD)

FYI: Anyone can upload pictures about the race to their Flickr account and if they add the tag oh02 it will be visible in a single stream that people can view from the web or from an RSS reader: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/oh02/

This goes for Schmidt supporters too

Fran for Dean over @ DKos has set it up so that Daily Kos veterans can phone bank from anywhere calling Democrats to remind them to vote. GREAT IDEA! Go over and check out what you need to do. They are being careful about who they let do it.

Project Logic reports on Schmidt campaign activities:

Jean Schmidt’s campaign spent all of last night putting up tons of new yard signs, district-wide.

The signs are designed to look like Rob Portman’s old signs and read: Vote Jean Schmidt, August 2nd. The idea is not only to link Schmidt to Portman, who has endorsed her, but to make sure supporters are aware that this is a special election so they will be voting before November.

(I don’t know about the rest of the team, but I didn’t get home until 6am.)

Good tactic in the sign design.

Do not underestimate the Schmidt campaign. I expect to see some serious hustle from their side.

Democratic Underground has another report of Republican push polling targetted at “predominately African-American communities”.

This is a stardard GOP tactic that I can confirm since I live in a “predominately African-American community”. It is unverified as of yet, but it is in their playbook.

I had this funny idea: whenever the GOP did a push poll in a race you would have a kind of open counter push poll that you would unleash against them. Similar to what was done to silence them on attacking Hackett’s character. Everytime they made a call lying about our candidate, people from around the country would do a similar but much larger coordinated attack against the opponent as a deterrent. You go there… we go there harder… a sort of open anti dirty tricks unit. Something to think about.