Welcome, Birmingham News readers
Kathy Kemp interviewed me this week, and her column ran today.
Will the real Patrick Cooper please stand up?
That noise you hear is the sound of chairs pushing back and scraping the floor. It seems the Birmingham lawyer, who lost to William Bell last week in a contentious runoff for mayor, is just one in a nation filled with Patrick Coopers.
One such Cooper, an online-products specialist with USA Today, became familiar with our Cooper after some people in Birmingham confused him, the USA Today guy, with the candidate. That's because the USA Today Cooper has a Web site called patrickcooper.com, which drew a lot of traffic from Birmingham in the months before the election.
"I got e-mails from people wanting to meet with me. I got asked to go on a radio show. One family even invited me to their holiday party," Cooper, the noncandidate, says by phone from his office near Washington.
Such odd fame. Read Kemp's full column, "A nation of Coopers."
The column leaves me wishing two things: to talk to Patrick Cooper the candidate and to have blogged years ago on talking to Patrick Cooper the stylist. All I remember of our call now is that he was a nice guy, got as big a kick out of talking as I did and had phone headset issues.
