A growing number of Virginia candidates are following a virtual path to political office, a road that cuts through the increasingly influential blogosphere. Republican Brian Schoeneman, who blogs at the right-leaning novacommonsense.com, filed to run for the state House of Delegates this fall.
Ben Tribbett, a longtime Democratic activist who writes the blog Not Larry Sabato, is currently weighing a bid for state Senate.
| ‘Tito the Builder’ forms PAC, weighs run for office |
| Prince William County’s Tito Munoz – better known as “Tito the Builder” – rose to national fame during the 2008 presidential campaign stumping with Sarah Palin. But now he’s thinking about running for political office himself. |
| “I’ve always been involved in politics since I was a citizen,” said Munoz, who owns a construction company in Woodbridge and is now weighing a run for either the state House of Delegates or state Senate. “I have not stopped.” |
| Munoz, a Columbia native who became a U.S. citizen in 2008, recently started a political action committee, TitoPAC. |
| “I was born in Colombia, but I was made in the U.S.A.,” he said. “There’s a need to help candidates who share our philosophy.” |
| Munoz, a Republican who Gov. Bob McDonnell appointed to the Virginia Board of Housing and Community Development last year, said that he’s running to do something about the national debt, job creation and energy independence. |
| “I believe we have a good chance of [electing] conservatives into the Virginia Assembly,” he said. “People have seen the last three years of Obama and the Democratic Party.” |
| Some politicians who go to Richmond or Washington find when they get there, they lose a sense of who they are, Munoz noted. |
| “It’s important for people like me who’s a common person, who’s a regular guy” to be involved in government, he said. |
| “[People] know where I stand,” he said. |
And Republican Jim Riley, editor in chief of Virginia Virtucon, is considering a run for the Prince William County Board of Supervisors after deciding against running for the House of Delegates.
“I think this is a new model,” Tribbett said of the blog-to-ballot path to a political career. “It hasn’t totally played itself out yet.”
Schoeneman, a former Bush administration official who’s now the legislative and political director for the Seafarers International Union of North America, has been blogging in Virginia since 2009. He’s been on the sidelines long enough, he said, and has come to believe he can make more of a difference by running.
“I’m more interested in policy and getting things done than I am about scoring political points,” he said. “I would recommend anybody who writes to take a step away from the keyboard and out into the real world – that would be healthy.”
More than television before it, the Internet is blurring the lines between those who chronicle the political world and those who occupy it. Any number of politicians have moved on to careers as media pundits after leaving office – Joe Scarborough on MSNBC or Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin on Fox – though the number of journalists jumping into politics is a far smaller clique. J.D. Hayworth was a television sports reporter before winning a congressional seat in Arizona.
But bloggers who cover politics aren’t really in the same category as mainstream journalists, and so their increasing interest in moving to the other side of the line shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, Dan Palazzolo, a political science professor at the University of Richmond, said.
“I think that bloggers are political activists, and political activists in every era have thrown their hat into the ring,” he said.
Riley of Virginia Virtucon agreed that the blogger-turned-candidate is a natural progression, but said it’s not an entirely new phenomenon. Longtime Virginia blogger Shaun Kenney was elected to the Fluvanna County Board of Supervisors in 2009.
In any case, bloggers still face the same pitfalls candidates have always faced in political campaigns. They have left a virtual paper trail, writings and positions that can be revisited by opponents intent on undermining them on the campaign trail.
“In my case,” Tribbett said, “there’s probably more material out there to pick apart.”
