Is Pulido's Campaign Secret? No, But Illinois Review Thinks So

UPDATED, 23 March: About Rosanna Pulido's Trouble Campaign Is Rosanna Pulido's campaign "secret?" Illinois Review thinks so. I love Illinois Review, but I must say that I personally know that they are quite mistaken. Pulido is the conservative Republican running against Stroger Democrat Mike Quigley in the April 7 special election for the Illinois 5th Congressional District. Editor Fran Eaton, whom I admire and consider a friend, wrote a confusing piece for IR on Sunday, March 15 in which she wrote the following. Sure beats us as to what point Rosanna Pulido's supporters are trying to make by keeping their efforts to win Rahm Emanuel's congressional seat a secret from like-minded and widely read conservative sources such as Illinois Review, but being open and giving interviews to national political sources such as RedState.org. What's up with that? First, it must be pointed out that RedState.org is not some insignificant website. Neither is Illinois Review, but the hard cold fact is that RedState is much bigger. Bigger, that is, in terms of reach, of links to the sites, of traffic in general. You can check this for yourself by comparing the websites marketleap.com and at Alexa.com, where you'll find that Redstate.com has a traffic rank of, 42,655, whereas Illinoisreview.typepad.com has a traffic rank of 425,669. (The lower the number the better for traffic ranking.) Fran Eaton's post continued: From RedState we learn that Tom Roeser hosted an exclusive secret meeting on winning back the seat April 7. We'll stand by and report from afar....as Pulido and Roeser obviously want it...Good luck with that, folks! Chicago News Bench was at Tom Roeser's meeting on Saturday, March 14. It was not "secret," as Fran Eaton charges, nor was it "exclusive." "Ordinary people" were in among the approximately 40 guests. To call it "exclusive" gives the wrong impression that only VIPs were. Hell, I was there, so how "exclusive" could it have been?!? Pulido did not control the invitations. It was Tom Roeser's party, so to speak. The entire purpose of the meeting was to discuss strategy for raising the public awareness of the Pulido campaign. The fact that Pulido's campaign made RedState aware of their meeting is due to several things: There was no attempt to keep the meeting "secret" or not even RedState would have been made aware of it, albeit after the fact; friend Warner Todd Huston, who wrote the piece for RedState, was at the meeting himself, so it's no mystery that RedState had the story before Illinois Review did; Fran Eaton either missed her invitation to attend the meeting or was not invited - in either case, you'd have to ask Tom Roeser about it, whose party is was and who controlled the invitations. Complaining about imagined conspiratorial motives by the Pulido campaign is pointless. Fran Eaton continued, "Secondhand, we'll report what RedState wrote..." whereupon she quoted from RedState's post. Wouldn't it have been more efficient to simply phone the Pulido campaign and request an interview? I think so. I would hate to see this turn into a website pissing war for territory by conservative websites. I don't think it will, since the much bigger RedState.com probably doesn't much care whether smaller competitors like Illinois Review tosses barbs at them without concern for any collateral damage it may do to the Pulido campaign. However, doing so would not serve the mutually held goal of putting a conservative into the seat of the Illinois 5th Congressional District. It would only harm a campaign that Illinois Review says it cares about. RELATED: Illinois Republicans Can’t Stop Eating Their Own (RedState) Chicago News Bench RSS Feed Cool Stuff...