Iowa politics pre-Google
Republican candidate for governor Christopher Rants was in about a week ago and he had an interesting observation about Terry Branstad getting into the race. Specifically, he talked about a lack of easily-retrievable articles about the ex-governor.
You want to know something about me, Rants said, and all you have to do is Google my name and there’s a 1,000 articles.
He has a good point. Today’s politics is a lot different than it was in Branstad’s hey-day. Today, opposition research is pretty easy. Google makes it so. Even looking for the really embarrassing courthouse stuff is easier, thanks to the Internet and the increasing willingness of courts to post documents online.
But, as Rants pointed out, Branstad is shielded from some of this because the stories written about his four terms are all pre-Google.
Well, today it looks like Rants is trying to even the scales. He’s added a new feature to his web site — an archive in which he’s scanned “news from the 80s and 90s,” as he puts it.
Don’t expect a lot of stories about Duran Duran, Big Hair or the A-Team.
Rants first article, posted today, is about……yes, Terry Branstad.
The piece, an 11-year-old David Yepsen column in the Des Moines Register, is headlined “Branstad, the liberal governor”.
Rants promises a “blast from the past” every week. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other candidates follow suit. In fact, there are probably a lot of folks visiting their local library to pull copies of old articles to be scanned onto web pages.