| I couldn't resist: I poked into Norm Coleman's supporter database, made publicly available by the Coleman campaign itself and subsequently provided for public consumption by Wikileaks.org.
I'm not going to provide the database, or any links deeper than to Wikileaks' homepage, from which you can confirm what I found on your own. But the disclaimers aside, the headline says it all.
Campaigns are required to track the source of records like these -- since they buy, lease, and otherwise borrow lists from various organizations, it's important (and legally required) to note where you got a given name from. Most campaign databases will include a column called "Source" or something similar to denote this piece of information.
And Coleman's database includes just such a column. One of the codes in that column is "gopjew_091307" -- and there are over 20,000 of them.
Coleman is Jewish, as is his Democratic opponent Al Franken. But of 50,000 names in the database, over 20,000 from a single list, brought to the campaign September 13th, 2007?
There are a couple of possible connections here -- On September 20th of that year, Coleman sponsored a Sense of the Senate resolution that said "that the U.S. should 'combat, contain, and roll back' Iran's 'violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq."
Earlier this year, after he was shuffled out of the Senate once his term officially expired, Coleman accepted a role with the Republican Jewish Coalition, which very well could be the source of the "gopjew_091307" source list in the first place. There's no way to know for sure.
But 40% of a supporter database from a single source in the American Jewish political lobby could make for a very powerful special interest arrangement for a former Senator. Whatever organization it was that leased, sold, or gave its list to the Coleman campaign, they're more than entitled to their views and their advocacy efforts. I don't expect the RJC to give Al Franken their list any time soon.
But it's worth asking, if it was the RJC, whether the provision of their supporter list was a leading indicator of Coleman's support for their agenda, or a trailing one -- and what part it played in their later hiring of the former Senator for a job about which we still don't know much. |
