Mock Draft: Part 2

Comment as left on DraftJohnSharp.com:

Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 07:53:16 -0500 From: "Haigler Clearwire" Subject: Haigler: Contested Democratic primary good for party

The "Draft John Sharp for Governor" website is found at:
http://www.draftjohnsharp.com/Comments.asp

My comments there were:

A contested race for governor would help the Democratic Party. I'm tired of people telling me, "I'm a Democrat but had to vote Republican because (blah, blah, blah) contested race(s) over there."
However, I'm supporting Chris Bell for Governor. Chris had the cajones to stand up to Tom DeLay and that's the kind of leadership we need in Texas.

-Dave Haigler
Taylor County Democratic Chair

Here's what's on DraftJohnSharp.com ...

A contested race for governor would help the Democratic Party. I'm tired of people telling me, "I'm a Democrat but had to vote Republican because (blah, blah, blah) contested race(s) over there."

-Dave Haigler
Taylor County Democratic Chair

Hmmm, that's a little different, isn't it? Not surprisingly, the folks at Archer Nathan haven't responded to my emails yet. But then again, they still haven't gotten the Lee Leffingwell comments out of the source code either. Feel free to contact them yourselves, though:

Christian Archer
christian@archernathan.com

Mark Nathan
mark@archernathan.com

Here's some sample questions:
Is John Sharp a client of yours?
Is DraftJohnSharp.com your website?
Has John Sharp named a treasurer yet?

That last one is rather important if the campaign is effectively spending campaign cash.

UPDATE: Well, a little bit of resolution here. One of the principals of Archer Nathan emails me with the following (also updated on Burnt Orange):

Mr. Wythe:

We were hired to create draftjohnsharp.com by a client in Dallas who is a John Sharp supporter, and we in turn hired TradeMark Media to help us. Archer Nathan is not working for John Sharp (you can send your $5 to the address below), but we like his record and we hope he runs.

Fine and well as that would appear to resolve any issue of ethics and legalities. Now if we can just get some straightforward resolution on the edited comments on the site as well as a bit of a return to reality about some of the names left on the site. Right now the front page of comments has endorsements from SMU Student, UT Student and UTEPer. I sure hope more effort is put into Sharp's ballot petitions than this.

As it stands, this is still an astroturf movement by any other name.