In the run-up to next Tuesday’s vote to fill the seat of the late and legendary Sen. Ted Kennedy, a spate of polls indicate that Republican state Sen. Scott Brown is giving Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley a run for her money. After easily outpacing three spirited opponents for the Democratic nomination, Coakley seems to have taken that feat as tantamount to a ticket for entry into the World’s Most Exclusive Club. But, his base is energized and eager to send a message; hers is listless and lethargic.
So in a state that hasn’t sent a single Republican to Washington in over a decade, it looks like the GOP has a genuine shot at an upset. Having assumed that the Democratic nominee would waltz to Washington, political observers are now scrambling to catch up on how events of this race have unfolded.
Luckily for all of us, there’s kennedyseat.com. The blogger behind this site has remained behind the scenes, but his assiduous attention to every aspect and every candidate in this contest has produced an archive of posts that sketches its narrative. By perusing kennedyseat.com’s past posts, the reader notices stories popping up about the Coakley campaign, then Democratic campaign committees, then unions and other interest groups issuing attacks – via various media – aimed directly at the Republican Brown, even deigning to mention his name, when they previously pretended that Coakley was unopposed by any credible candidate. With posts like those, kennedyseat.com chronicled how this special election became a real race.
There are plenty of blogs dedicated to political news in a specific city or state, and these are valuable resources offering a wealth of background when the place they cover becomes newly-contested turf. But there’s little precedent for a blog dedicated from its inception to a specific election. Let’s hope that kennedyseat.com becomes a template for blogs dedicated to future elections, and that it reaps the credit it deserves for doing it so well.
Here’s how the our mystery blogger describes the advent of the site and it’s mission:
“kennedyseat.com was created on September 1, 2009 to report on and analyze the race for the Senate, while offering some perspective and a sense of humor.
The author of kennedyseat.com is a political junkie who mourns the loss of Senator Kennedy but is intrigued by the upcoming special Senate election to fill his vacant seat.
The author hates to remain anonymous, but has a day job working for a non-political entity. Therefore, posts will refrain from any personal attacks, because the author does not believe in bashing people anonymously, especially anyone who has the guts to put their name on a ballot.
The author does reserve the right to make light-hearted jokes about candidates”
So, unclouded by the vitriol and snarkiness of a partisan attack blog, kennedyseat.com found its voice as an agreggator of campaign news. And, a mercifully impartial aggregator at that, though it’s by no means disinterested, as the blogger avers that this is “the biggest race to hit Massachusetts since the Boston Marathon.”
Part of the value in the aggregator role played by this site is that it offers the reader links that he might otherwise never think to visit. Gravitating only to the politics page of the website of an old media outlet like the Boston Globe or to WBUR.org, site of NPR’s showpiece Boston station, a reader would miss all the coverage heaped on the race by Boston’s network affiliate TV and radio news sites, and all the video and audio that they offer.
The new media-savvy site creator bolstered blogging with a Twitter feed that impressed WaPo’s political junky Chris Cillizza, and a daily digest of the blog’s post delivered to the inbox of any subscriber.
In addition catching the eyeballs of elite readers in media and on campaign staffs, kennedyseat.com seems to reaching actual voters, having been “visited more than 52,000 times by more than 17,350 visitors,” our “blogger behind the curtain” boasted in an email message. By helping Massachusetts voters better inform their voting decisions, kennedyseat.com may prove to have had a hand in this making this race an actual contest. And the vigorous debate of a contested election isn’t a bad thing for American democracy,
There’s another reason to check in with kennedyseat.com than just keeping up to speed with events as the campaign comes to a crashing crescendo. In the course of an email exchange, the blogger hinted that it may very well reveal its identity by the time the polls close on Tuesday. It may be a name new to most of us. But, that name deserves to be recognized in the future, especially by any of those hoped-for emulators.
