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Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Ohio 2006 & Senator Reid's War Room

Posted by Tim Tagaris

Is there a connection between Senator Reid's "war room" and the mid-term election of 2006 in Ohio?

Until last week, it looked like Congressman Ted Strickland was poised to run for governor in the state of Ohio. While researching potential candidates, I looked at obvious Ohio candidate domain names to see if they were purchased and by whom.

I started with the most obvious URL first.

Domain name: strickland2006.com

Registrant:
Ari Rabin-havt (email omitted)
2117 L St NW #211
Washington, DC 20027-1524
United States (phone number omitted)

Same with strickland2006.org
Same with stricklandforgovernor.com & .org
Same with stricklandforohio.com & .org

The guy hired to handle netroots outreach in Senator Reid's "war room" purchased them all. Each of them. Every last one.

One of two things are going on here.

A) Ari was primed to work for Ted Strickland in a netroots outreach/communications capacity as he did for John Kerry. It should also be no secret to anyone with political savvy that there is a boat load of money available online for whoever takes on Kenneth Blackwell for governor. Ari seems like a logical hire.

or

B) He is a cybersquatter who scoops up domain names and does who knows what with them.

Option 'A' seems most likely to me.

Rewind to last week...

Next thing you know, Strickland bowed out of the race and backed fellow congressman, my personal hero, Sherrod Brown. Strickland leaves his future plans in the air cryptically noting that he would run for federal office in 2006. Does that mean a Senate run or re-election to his congressional district?

Back to network solutions to search for what domain names are taken and who owns them.

www.stricklandforsenate.com -- available
www.stricklandforsenate.org -- available

In fact, every derivative I could think of that would involve a Ted Strickland senate run is available as well.

What does that mean? It could mean nothing at all.

To me, it means that Ted Strickland isn't running for anything at all and Jerry Springer is going to be the Democratic nominee for United States Senate. Springer is acting like a candidate and was named Ohio Democrat of the year last year. Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! has paid his dues and Democrats will need a unique candidate to take on an admired Senator DeWine. Springer also just launched his new radio show two weeks ago. Add it up.

As for the race to become Ohio's chief executive, if it's not Sherrod Brown, it will probably be Michael Coleman, Mayor of Columbus.

And yes, colemanforohio.com is taken...

Posted at 03:04 PM in Ohio | Technorati

Comments

Searching around, I found this page that states that Avi worked for Ted Strickland at some previous time.

Posted by: Paul at January 26, 2005 09:04 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment