The blogger and the comedian

NY Times:

On a laptop at a kitchen table in this cheery Twin Cities suburb, headlines ripping into Al Franken, the satirist whose campaign for the United States Senate is seen as one of the most competitive in the nation, are written up day after day for Minnesota Democrats Exposed, a political blog created by a former Republican Party researcher.

Michael B. Brodkorb, the blog’s creator, has worked on the campaigns of some of this state’s top Republicans. Mr. Brodkorb’s critics say the Web site’s claims, screamed in red uppercase letters, are often breathless, far-fetched and painfully partisan.

But Minnesota Democrats Exposed has dealt several blows to Mr. Franken’s campaign lately: revelations that he owed $25,000 to the State of New York for failing to pay workers’ compensation insurance and that his corporation was in forfeiture in California.

With only weeks until the state Democratic Party’s convention, where Mr. Franken is expected to win the party’s endorsement to run against Senator Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, people here disagree about how much these financial questions will matter to voters in the fall.

What Mr. Franken’s circumstance has proven, though, is that no Minnesota candidate this fall can afford to ignore Mr. Brodkorb, or the rest of the state’s universe of Web sites devoted to local politics. Experts here say the abundance of these blogs is a mirror onto this state, its partisan split in recent years and its long tradition of intense political activism (by some measures, voter turnout here was the highest in the nation in 2006). That said, they are anything but Minnesota Nice.

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The Franken campaign has played down the significance of the revelations first raised on Mr. Brodkorb’s site, but there are signs the tax problems may be trouble for Mr. Franken, a former comedian who has worked hard to show voters that his campaign is serious. A recent poll of voters by The Minneapolis Star Tribune that showed Mr. Coleman leading Mr. Franken (though within the margin of error), also found that 42 percent of those polled were not satisfied with Mr. Franken’s explanations of his tax problems; 28 percent said the problems made them less likely to vote for him.

“This looks like random incompetence mostly,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “But Franken has taken a pounding, getting tattooed by story after story, which is preventing him from making this a referendum on the incumbent.”

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That is of course one of the points. It has gotten Franken off message and playing defense on issues that Obama would call distractions that many voters instead call important concerns about the content of his character. Brodkorb's form of blogging is hard work. It is the kind of work that the media usually does itself when looking at Republicans. When it is a Democrat candidate Brodkorb might be described as part of the "right wing" food chain of negative news about their guy.