Virginia bloggers are familiar with Saun Kenney, the long-time political blogger who became communications director for the Republican Party of Virginia. The RPV as an institution (as opposed to elected officials) had never made much effort to reach out to the blogging community, but that’s changing.
Writes Jeff Schapiro in his update on the transportation saga in today’s Times-Dispatch: “[Kenney] said Republicans also want to ‘keep the conversation going’ on transportation through bloggers. Kenney circulates to reporters the Web addresses of blogs carrying musings on the road-and-rail fight.”
If Kenney has any sense, which he does, http://www.baconsrebellion.blogspot.com is not one of the URLs he’s passing around. None of the contributors to this blog, or the people commenting in it, have taken kindly to the Republican transportation plan. Whether we’re on the list or not, it’s good for MSM reporters to see what the blogs are saying. The commentary on the better blogs is a lot meatier than the 30-second campaign commercial the PRV has been running.
Anything that Kenney can do to “keep the conversation” going is a positive, too, if it helps disrupt the MSM meta-narrative of the transportation debate as purely a tax-and-spend issue. Try as they might, the Republicans have had a dilly of a time shifting the conversation to the positive elements of the GOP transportation package (and, yes, there are positive elements). My teeth nearly dropped out of my head when I saw that Schapiro actually acknowledged other aspects of the debate with an entire sentence in his story:
Kenney said the proposal includes features about which Kaine has spoken favorably. Among them: controls on land use and greater accountability from the state road bureaucracy.
If the Republicans read Bacon’s Rebellion, they’ll grasp very quickly that there is widespread skepticism that the billions of dollars their plan would raise would be spent wisely. If the GOPpers want to win the tug of war with Gov. Timothy M. Kaine over the transportation debate, they need to pound away at the reform and accountability features of their bill, which have gone largely overlooked in the press coverage so far.