DuPage County blogger Hiram Wurf gets press

From today’s Courier News, a great article about Hiram Wurf’s weblog:

It couldn’t be easier to find out what DuPage County Board candidate Hiram Wurf is thinking.

Since March, the Naperville Democrat has maintained a running commentary on local, state and national politics at his Web site, www.wurfwhile.com, making him one of the few people seeking office at the local level to maintain what’s known as a blog — essentially a regularly updated online journal that is typically the work of a single contributor.

Hiram is a great friend of mine, and as a result of his work on the Dean campaign, was inspired to run for local office. I helped him get his blog set up, and in the past four months he’s been on a tear. Nathaniel Zimmer really gets why Hiram’s efforts (and, by extension, those of other candidates trying to connect with voters) are important: never before have candidates had such a great opportunity to let people know who they are. Says Hiram, “If you’re not willing to be open with the people you’re trying to communicate with, then you lose a lot of what blogging is about. I want (the public) to understand what I’m about.”

Congrats to Hiram for the good coverage, and kudos to Zimmer for a solid article.

This coverage is a stark contrast to the weak article in this weekend’s Chicago Tribune, which has the word “fundraising” in the title but somehow fails to mention how much money a single blog has raised. If you combined Kos and Atrios, they’d be tied with GOPAC in dollars raised (about $700k). And this quote was priceless:

“If you give an outsized voice to people who are political junkies, that may distort the process sometimes,” said Seth Merritt, a Web strategist at Issue Dynamics, a Washington-based consulting group.

Yeah, I hate it when people speak up. Much easier for the process to run its course when we have fewer people to listen to. But this is presumably a position Hiram’s opponent would agree with:

“I don’t know where he stands on the issues and I have not looked at his Web site,” [Wurf’s opponent] Schroeder said. “I’m not a Web site kind of guy.”

When told about the site, Schroeder called it “an interesting modern gambit.”