Jason Bane in Westword

Westword did a feature article on me and my campaign this week. You can read the entire story here, and I've included an excerpt below:

Most politicians spend their lives trying to get people to know their name. But Jason Bane, the Democratic Party candidate for Jefferson County commissioner against incumbent Republican Kevin McCasky, isn't most politicians.

In late 2004, when he helped launch the ColoradoPols.com website, Bane did so anonymously, and he left his moniker off his many posts there even after July 2005, when the Rocky Mountain News published an article revealing his identity. According to Bane, who's cut way back on his ColoradoPols writing since beginning his campaign, he didn't choose to perform his duties in the shadows "thinking, I wonder if this is going to hurt my chances if I run for office someday. In retrospect, will it? Maybe. But I can't think of anything off the top of my head I wrote that I'd regret." After a pause, he adds, "I'm sure there's something..."

Such concerns aren't commonplace, given that relatively few bloggers have made the transition from online firebrand to political hopeful. Indeed, the most prominent Colorado blogger-turned-candidate other than Bane is Republican Joshua Sharf, who aspires to serve as a state representative in the 6th District. (Sharf authors a blog called "View From a Height" and has contributed to the Denver Post's PoliticsWest.com site, home of the so-called Gang of Four, in addition to co-hosting a KNUS talk show with former state senator John Andrews.) So Bane is moving into relatively new territory, and he's finding it to be an often hostile place, thanks in part to conservative bloggers who accuse him — yes, anonymously — of hiding information about his employment by a prominent international union.

For his part, Bane insists that his past is an open book — one he has no problem letting potential voters peruse. A Jeffco native, he attended the University of Missouri's acclaimed journalism school with the idea of becoming a TV reporter. But he changed his mind following a stint at the NBC station affiliated with the college. "I was doing a live shot from a pumpkin festival," he recalls. "And I thought, what am I doing here?" So he turned to print, writing about sports for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before relocating to the Denver area and taking a position with Westwind Media, an ahead-of-its-time Internet radio provider that paid for its prescience by going bust. From there, Bane served as a regular stringer for People magazine, penning human-interest stories and the occasional celebrity piece. "Let's just say I know my share about Ben Affleck," he admits, laughing. In the meantime, he got involved in politics, managing Dem Vince Buzek's unsuccessful 2002 campaign to unseat Republican Shawn Mitchell in Colorado House District 33 and playing the same role for Mitch Morrissey, who was elected Denver District Attorney in 2004...

...To Bane, the muck being flung his way represents a distraction from much more important matters. "I was born and raised in the county, and I've watched over the past several years the ridiculous scandals that have come out of there: the indictments, the accusations, the lawsuit," he says. In the end, "I got fed up. I want to see the government run in a manner that addresses the issues that people in the county are concerned about, like what kind of future growth we want."

Of course, the odds that the campaign will stick to such subjects exclusively are mighty slim, especially considering the direction in which the preliminary stages of the race have gone — and Bane concedes that his anonymous blogging past may offer opponents ammo to use against him. "One of the things I fully expect to happen is that someone will take something out of context from ColoradoPols and put it in a negative mail piece," he allows. "Whether I wrote it or not, they'll say it was me" — and he'll have difficulty refuting such a claim, since "literally thousands of posts" have gone up on the site over the years, and at this point, "I don't remember what I wrote or didn't write."