Grassroots

Last night, I stopped by a grassroots reception at Paul Hackett's Columbus field office. There was a pretty good turnout of a hundred people or so, and Hackett stopped by to shake some hands and speak a few brief words.

I got the impression that most of the attendees were political neophytes. I heard a lot of background chatter, thing like, "Oh, Paul has a primary opponent? Who's that?" and "Who's Sherrod Brown?" This could be taken a couple of different ways. You could focus on the positive and say that Hackett is drawing more people into the process, or you could focus on the negative and say that his volunteers lack experience. There's probably a little bit of truth in both of those statements.

As far as Hackett himself, it was actually the first time I had ever heard him speak. He's pretty smooth.