the primaries are over, results are mostly in, and other than (or perhaps despite) the serious problems with polls not opening on time (if at all) in marion county, there are few surprises. greg ballard was won the right to lose november's mayoral election to bart peterson, but at least his candidacy will be a good excuse to slip the word "ballardian" into conversation. and elsewhere throughout the region, the two parties' favored candidates won their primary fights in most cases.

but not all. one notable exception is in the GOP nominations for city-county council. as various blogs reported in february, for some inexplicable reason, the local GOP chose michael jezierski, better known as wingnut blogger "sir hailstone", as one of its four preferred candidates for the at-large seats on the council. on more than one occasion i've put on my waders and trudged through the stream of crap on his blog, documenting all the childish name-calling and other unbecoming conduct, only to have him delete everything shortly thereafter, so i won't waste time pointing to all the silliness on his campaign blog... but here's a taste: "there is the inherent left wing media bias in effect concerning Gannett newspapers." (hailstone hates the indy star, but that didn't stop him from writing an LTE proposing some kind of fascist boot camp for truant students. it's your guess where we'd get the funding to basically imprison teenagers for cutting school too often.)

anyway, with 873 of the county's 914 precincts reporting in, jezierski is trailing barbara malone by 241 votes. it seems unlikely that there are enough uncounted votes out there for hailstone to turn that gap around, which means that hailstone's bid to be elected to city-county council is already over.

all three of the GOP's other chosen at-large candidates won easily. but not hailstone. i googled barbara malone but didn't learn much other than that she's a lawyer.

this leaves several questions: who is malone, and why was she able to get more votes than a party-slated candidate? why did the party pick a joke candidate like hailstone over malone or the other three republican candidates? and, perhaps most interestingly, did his past as a freeper and wingnut blogger kill his campaign?

i'm not aware of many other cases of bloggers running for office (not candidates who blog, but people who become known as bloggers first and then run for office later), so hailstone's defeat could be instructional not just locally, but nationally. primary elections, particularly in off-years like this one, are "elite" elections, where few other than die-hard political junkies show up at the polls—exactly the type of person most likely to read political blogs. and candidate jezierski's past as a right-wing troll, including his putting out a bounty for dirt on "that tdw bitch", was reported on two of the state's largest blogs, advance indiana and taking down words. and hailstone was in fact a regular commenter at AI, the largest republican blog in the state, leaving all sorts of inane comments before he got serious and tried to kill off the hailstone persona. so it's hard to imagine that there weren't at least a few GOP voters who got into the booth and thought "jezierski? i'm not going to vote for that hailstone creep..."

oh, a couple more questions: what's in the future for sir hailstone, now that his dreams of public service are dashed (for a couple years, at least)? will his old blog spring back to life once more? or perhaps he'll go on a tirade about how his loss was caused by the county's problem with unopened polling places? will he call for a recount or a "do-over" election? or will he accept his defeat with dignity, as his hero eric dickerson never did? ¶

That very clever and witty Jen Wagner at TDW coined the new moniker for Jeziersky: "Sir Failstone" !

Teehee ¶

this post popped up on a google search i just did. it's pretty amusing to read it tonight. the right to lose to peterson? who would have thought. and, hello barbara malone! declared a winner early in the CCC race. ¶

hailstone bore a grudge against malone for at least a month after she defeated him in the primary. i wonder if his feelings have since changed, or simply intensified. ¶