This was just too good to pass up. The folks at PolitickerMD obviously know that this is a pretty slow time for political doings in the state so to promote discussion (and of course readership) they have inaugurated their first Maryland’s Smartest Legislator tournament.
With regions being named after great Maryland legislators of the past (or so they claim), the writers of PolitickerMD selected 32 of those they considered the most intelligent that Maryland’s General Assembly has to offer and placed them against each other in a single-elimination voting contest that will run with elimination rounds until a final on May 16th. Of course, my first objection is that there’s only 7 Republicans among the field of 32; I pretty much think that if you’re talking about intelligence as far as common sense then the field should be fully from the GOP. Additionally, the lone Eastern Shore representative in the field is State Senator E.J. Pipkin (State Senator Harris is also in the field as a #1 seed.)
Is it gimmicky? Of course it is. But as I noted earlier we’re in a slow political period and I’ll be interested to see how my choices do like anyone else who participates. It may just be enough to end the lower Eastern Shore’s three-month stranglehold on the “most influential political blog” title.
Speaking of that title, while I took Bud the Blogger to task yesterday about his recent post attempting to tie Senator Harris to the inflated prices we suffer from at the gas pump, I do agree somewhat more with his assessment on the BNN Influence Index as well as with many of those who commented. As I noted there, if it were solely based on readership and political content then blogs like The Hedgehog Report or O’Malley Watch would score highly each and every week; frankly I’m surprised those two underperform as they do. Neither aspires primarily to a local audience like other highly ranked sites do.
So whether PolitickerMD is going to increase its BNN ranking over the next couple weeks by running their contest remains to be seen, but it is an interesting diversion for a time when political news is reasonably slow.
