Menino machine grinds fine, indeed

How else to explain why John Dunlap, the mayor’s director of labor relations, was doing such a detailed analysis of how much Boston firefighters have donated to rival Michael F. Flaherty’s campaign?

Those identifying themselves as city firefighters have contributed some $16,500 to Flaherty. But Dunlap says the figure does not reflect small donations from firefighters who are not asked to list their occupations, nor does it count what the family members of firefighters have been pouring into Flaherty’s coffers.

Dunlap used firefighters’ addresses gleaned from payroll records and cross-referenced them with Flaherty contributors. He also searched for similarly named donors who once shared an address with a firefighter. Thus his tally of what firefighters and their families have given to Flaherty comes to about $40,000.

Dunlap says he did the analysis to demonstrate the depth of firefighters’ support, not to identify individual city workers who are supporting Menino’s rival. Everyone already knows city firefighters are mad at the mayor over protracted contract negotiations, he said.

“I want to be clear that I’m not doing it on city time,’’ he said in a telephone interview from City Hall on Wednesday afternoon.

One wears crisp business suits (Romney); the other is notorious for donning short-sleeved shirts with his ties (Capuano). One is an unabashed liberal (Capuano); the other proudly broadcasts his conservatism to a national audience (Romney). One of them (Romney) has hair fit for a television commercial; the other one (Capuano), well, not so much.

But there is one thing that both politicians believe in: using your sons to pitch in on the campaign trail.

During his presidential race, Romney’s five adult children started a blog, Five Brothers, on which they pitched their father’s campaign message and shared intimate insights, such as their love of the Red Sox, Billy Joel, and “Saturday Night Live.’’

Capuano’s US Senate campaign recently launched a blog, and his two sons have begun posting updates from the trail.

“My name is Mike Capuano (no - not that one! I’m his son, named for the original Michael Capuano, my great-grandfather),’’ wrote one of the sons.

Another post, on Columbus Day, read: “My name is Joe Capuano, and my father is running for US Senate. I will be posting some updates from the campaign as I see it, in order to highlight this race from a totally different perspective, that you most certainly won’t read anywhere else.’’

Jack E. Robinson, a perennial Republican candidate for office, has spent $100,000 of his own money over the last month to hire signature-gatherers, and he now appears poised to make the Senate ballot in the Dec. 8 GOP primary.

Robinson, who said he contracted with a consultant to get him the necessary 10,000 certified signatures, plans to make an official announcement of his candidacy this week. Assuming he does join the race, Robinson will go head to head with Brown, the Wrentham state senator whom the party has rallied behind in the race to fill Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat.

Robinson’s last-minute entry has caught the party and the political world by surprise. Though some GOP leaders acknowledge they face an uphill battle, the party is trying to at least set Brown up nicely for a future statewide run if he comes up short this time. One Republican official, who asked to remain anonymous, said the party would review the validity of Robinson’s signatures to determine whether to challenge them, with an eye to knocking him off the ballot.

Republicans first promoted Robinson to challenge Kennedy in 2000, but then had to back off when controversial issues surfaced in his personal life. Since then, Robinson has been a GOP nominee for secretary of state and for Congress.

Robinson, a Duxbury resident and lawyer who became wealthy in the late 1990s after selling a Caribbean-based telecommunications company, said Republican leaders have not asked him to back off. If he were asked, he said, he would tell them that primaries are good for the party and that he would not back down.

Trouble is, it looks like the problem extends to his campaign.

One afternoon last week, Dave Jacobson, campaign spokesman, sent out a press release misspelling the name of his boss, in both the subject line and the body of the e-mail.

The press release, touting an endorsement by a nonprofit group advocating nuclear disarmament, was titled as follows: “Khazee receives endorsement from the Council for a Livable World, nations leading organizationon on nuclean proliferation issues.’’

Maybe we’re being picky, but careful readers will note that “organizationon’’ and “nuclean’’ are also misspellings and that “nations’’ should be “nation’s.’’ Jacobson sent out a revised release five minutes after the first that corrected Khazei’s name, but the other errors remained.

The first sentence contends that the campaign “continues to gain momentum throughout the state.’’ How about gaining some proofreaders?