'Sup, Blog?

Forget the Old School Swift Boat Veterans. Say hello to "Minnesota Democrats Exposed" as the blogosphere will likely be the political battleground in Campaign '08. The Hopester had better get ready because the Righty attack dogs are going on the Internet.

Copyright © 1993 Peter Steiner and The New Yorker

Actually, the 2008-caption should read, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're an attack dog." If this is (fair & balanced) techno-terrorism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Senate Race in Minnesota Shows Power of Bloggers

By Monica Davey

On a laptop at a kitchen table in a 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.

The Future? Blogger Brodkorb, slaving over a hot keyboard.

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.

Eric Pusey’s liberal-leaning mnblue, for instance, tracks Mr. Coleman’s moves on a “Weasel Meter.” Some blog live from the smallest of political meetings and the forgotten campaign stops. Enough of these writers have cropped up here now to make a Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, better known here as the Mob.

“We’ve kind of got a center of gravity going on up here,” said Mitch Berg, part of a group that started a True North Web site in 2007.

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.”

In March, Mr. Brodkorb reported that Mr. Franken’s corporation, Alan Franken Inc., owed a penalty of $25,000 to the state compensation board in New York for failing to carry workers’ compensation insurance from 2002 to 2005. State officials said they sent Mr. Franken 12 letters on the matter, but received no answer.

Mr. Franken, who has since paid the debt, declined an interview on the issue. Andy Barr, a spokesman for the campaign, said Mr. Franken had not known of the oversight by the corporation (which consisted of Mr. Franken, his wife, Franni, and an assistant or two), and received none of the letters. The state’s letters were sent to the Frankens’ New York apartment, officials there say; the couple moved to Minnesota at the end of 2005, though the family still owns the apartment.

In April, Mr. Brodkorb wrote that Mr. Franken’s company was in forfeiture in California. Other reporters found the reason: California authorities said Mr. Franken’s company had failed to pay franchise tax fees from 2003 to 2006, and owed nearly $5,000, which Mr. Franken has since paid. Mr. Franken’s company paid no franchise taxes to the state in those years, Mr. Barr said, because Mr. Franken believed his accounting firm had shut down the corporation after 2002.

The reports led Mr. Franken to hire a new team of financial advisers to review his finances. Late last month, Mr. Franken announced the findings: although he had paid state income tax on his earnings, his accountant had, in some cases, paid it to the wrong states. Like professional athletes, entertainers are, in some instances, required to pay taxes to states where they earn money. He had paid more than $917,000 in state taxes to New York and Minnesota from 2003 to 2006, but should have sent parts of that sum (the total would actually have been about $4,000 higher) to 17 other states where he performed. Mr. Franken’s supporters, and several Democratic-leaning blogs, have dismissed the problems as meaningless, an accountant’s bureaucratic errors.

“We’re in two wars and a recession,” Mr. Barr said. “This is not the time to try to have an election about something else.”

Still, the campaign was clearly worried: it created an emergency phone bank one evening to call the more than 2,500 Democratic convention delegates and alternates and deliver the news before it came out the next day in the newspapers.

Many state Democrats (here, the party is known as the D.F.L., for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) dismiss Mr. Brodkorb as a mouthpiece for accusations the Republicans dig up and want to present in a way more likely to catch on than a news release. Indeed, Mr. Brodkorb, 34, once worked on the campaigns of Republican leaders including Mr. Coleman, and last year managed, without pay, the campaign of Ron Carey to be re-elected the state’s Republican chairman.

Mr. Brodkorb began his blog anonymously in 2004 when he was still working for the state party, then identified himself in 2006. “Look,” he said in an interview in his kitchen, “while my perspective is through partisan blinders, I think it passes the smell test every day.”

But Mr. Brodkorb insists that he gets tips from Democrats, too, and is not paid by the state party or any candidate. Tom Erickson, a spokesman for Mr. Coleman’s campaign, said it had not provided leads connected to Mr. Franken’s tax woes, adding, “Michael has an extensive network of sources.”

Republicans have seized on the slow trickle of developments, questioning Mr. Franken’s explanations and suggesting that more issues might emerge.

“There are so many unanswered questions,” said Mr. Carey, the state Republican chairman. “What resonates with people is, ‘I pay my taxes. Why shouldn’t he pay his?’ And it’s one of those things we’re probably at the opening chapters of the book in this story.”

Then again, already, there were other stories bubbling forth.

D.F.L.-leaning sites like MNPublius, the creation of Matt Martin, 23, had turned to claims that Mr. Coleman might face his own financial embarrassment: Mr. Coleman this month declined a D.F.L. demand that he return campaign donations from workers at a firm that once lobbied on behalf of a faction of Myanmar’s military government. Other sites raised questions about the state Republican Party’s own financial reporting issues; state party officials acknowledge they are reviewing Federal Election Commission filings since 2002, but argue that their sort of errors have been common among state party organizations.

[Monica Davey is the NYT's Chicago bureau chief.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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