Who Is Blogging The Houston Mayoral Race? Part 1

As I'm sure you can tell, I'm having a ball following the Houston mayoral candidates. The three frontrunners all have qualities I admire, so that makes it a little difficult to tear into them when I see missteps, but it's hard to resist when this race is so important to the future of our region. And, I'll say this again - I've been terribly impressed to see from the get go how much each one of them wants it and how hard they are working to earn votes.

When I talk about the frontrunners, I'm talking about Annise Parker, Peter Brown and Gene Locke. Yes, I will avoid mentioning Roy Morales, for the most part. I've been there and done that with him. Making fun of him at this point is like kicking around a kitten, and who wants to do that. Yuk. Helpless.

There are some other terrific bloggers reporting on the mayor's race - too many for one post, so here is Part One:

Greg's Opinion: Greg Wythe asked that all the mayoral campaigns put their mail pieces up on the internet and one campaign responded - Peter Brown. Of course, that may be because Peter's the only one with mail. We'd all love to comment on the many TV ads from the campaigns, but (again) since Brown is the only one on TV, Greg is doing a great job covering whatever free media exposure they are all getting. Greg is also going to be a good one to watch anytime you are wondering what the number crunching looks like. When the rest of us (OK, just me) get too lazy to do the math, we ask Greg, and turns out he's already done the work.

David Ortez: There's a new, talented, articulate blogger in Houston - yay! David claims he's getting too busy studying for the LSAT to blog much (sad!) but when he does post on the mayor's race, it's always a must read. He's been keeping track of who is running a mobile campaign, and even took this photo of what happens when you sign up for Brown's mobile campaign. I like his analysis of Brown's ads, maybe because we are in agreement! He was the only one evaluating the campaigns' social media strategies early on, where he gave the advantage to Parker. I first took notice of David when he participated in Gene Locke's social media summit. Here's a YouTube of his reaction to that event. Please put down those law books and post more often, David!

DosCentavos: Oh, my. It was this post that caused the Houston Chronicle to take notice of Stace Medellin. Stace, John and I were at the Latino Mayoral Debate where Gene Locke stated that when he was mayor there would be a Hispanic museum. Three paragraphs of that blog post made it into Bradley Olson's Chron blog. I was a little surprised that Locke's senior consultant from OUT OF TOWN, Kim Devlin, took this shot at Stace over those three paragraphs:

Medellin is only trying to deflect attention from the candidate he's endorsed trying to buy a grassroots endorsement for herself.

I'm just now connecting the dots here and am thinking why is it OK for an out of town person to go negative on one of our local bloggers and practically accuse him of being bought and had by Parker, but it's not OK for out of town Annie's List to go negative on Locke? Hmm. Anyway, Stace has blogged prolifically about the mayor's race including posting the great photos he took at Parker's filing rally, keeping the candidates accountable for their promises, and analyzing the poll numbers.

Follow these bloggers on Twitter: @gregwythe, @davidortez and @2centavos. I'll be back with more in Part Two soon.