Thursday, March 09, 2006

Shopping for a Candidate

You may have noticed some factlets about Cafaro showing up in Open. This one about her family supporting Republicans in the past, and this one disclosing the fact that Capri apparently was christened Janet (pronounced jan NAY) before choosing to name herself after pants.

Open’s trickle of Cafaro trivia may or may not be related to this article in yesterday’s Hill about the DC Dems pulling out the long knives for her. And may be related to commenter ExAkron posting identical attack comments here and on Ohio 13. The received wisdom in DC is that – this may sound familiar to regular readers – Cafaro can lose in November. Beyond that, Dems worry that Cafaro’s past immunity deal sullies the Dems’ attempts to run against Republican corruption.

So if Capri is so radioactive, why did she get recruited into the race? Why does she have a number of establishment Dems on her endorsement list? Steve Hoffman gave a clue this past weekend when he wrote up Tom Sawyer’s internal poll showing, well if an internal poll is released, you know what it says.

The point is, I suspect that much of Cafaro’s support is antiSawyer. Conventional wisdom said that Sawyer was damaged goods post-NAFTA, but he still does well among grassroots liberals and has almost Clintonesque popularity among Blacks. Meanwhile, my background sources say that he is not liked by the more dialed-in Dem activists and (more saliently) funders. Reasons vary and go beyond NAFTA. The specifics go beyond anything I would blog based on background sources, but suffice it to say today’s Tom Sawyer is not a popular guy in the party

A couple of observations about those less-than-shocking disclosures. Each contained a buried background fact I found more interesting. In the midst of the story about her family’s past flirtation with Republicans was a passing mention that Cafaro attended a private high school in Virginia. So she has even less experience in Ohio than we previously thought.

The story about the name change noted that eight years after her stated birthday she was telling people she was ten. Given the past questions about her child prodigy bio, has anyone looked up her birth certificate?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hehe!! Sometimes when you discuss Cafaro, I feel like you have an axe to grind. You've solidified your case nicely here, counselor, and you've fully convinced me now!

Anonymous said...

Her "establishment" support is basically just bought, either through hope of later donations or the simple knowledge that they won't have to give her any money.

And sometimes, just sometimes, journalists look stuff up on their own and aren't fed stories by one party or the other. I'm not saying the PD's started researching things, just the paranoia about campaigns leaking stories is getting absurd. They may be getting this info because its generally pretty amusing to say the least and she's a goldmine of crazy background stories.

Anonymous said...

Funny, 1986 New York Times article about Cafaro at the camp for kiddie investors clearly lists her as being 8 years old. Don't have strong opinions on this race. Just looking at the referenced articles myself, via Nexis.