Seal of Disapproval

One of the things modern parents teach their children these days is that what one posts online can come back to haunt you in the future. Pre-internet, that wasn't a problem, but it sure is now. 

Last week’s scandal, wherein an endorsed Republican candidate for Methacton School Board, Scott Misus, posted offensive comments on a public social media site, became a cautionary tale and living example of this important lesson. The Misus situation has made what one posts online relevant, and in an era of lazy and low-information voters, vividly illustrates how unwillingness to do one’s own research on candidates and to allow others to do your thinking for you can have serious consequences.

Political parties have their own agendas and tend to be run by people who like to play kingmaker for their own reasons, and since most people aren’t privy to insider info about the personalities, alliances and agendas, reliance on their opinions should be viewed as no more than a starting point; a guideline, not gospel.

And don't bank on the press to do meaningful vetting for you, either. The days of investigative reporters are largely gone, and very small budgets at most media outlets means they primarily publish little more than press releases.

Misus, who was jointly endorsed by the two Republican committees in Methacton School District (LP and Worcester; school board candidates cross file, and evidently the LP Dems decided not to endorse at all), has been dealt with by party leadership and officially stripped of his endorsement.  While it’s too late to have his name removed from voting machines, he will not be advocated as a candidate on Election Day. At considerable expense, party sample ballots were pulled and reprinted without his name on them. His name was painstakingly removed from yard signs on which he appeared.  The viewpoints he expressed are not shared by the members of the local party or the other endorsed candidates.

Absolutely, I think we should have done a better job of vetting our candidates. Court records were scrutinized but we should have gone further. All candidates were asked at the endorsement meeting whether there was any information about themselves that could embarrass the party, and Misus either forgot about these Facebook posts or didn’t see a problem with them, as they were not mentioned.

But that’s typical and not a good way to vet candidates unless you already know the answer and are verifying a candidate’s honesty. Candidates often lie or mislead. They forget, hedge, hide, engage in wishful thinking, and understandably try to put the best face on things. A good vetting process is systematic and ideally discovers both the strengths and weaknesses of candidates before offering them assistance or support. You can’t rely only on what a candidate tells you.

However, even when one DOES know of adverse information that defies explanation, sometimes parties move forward with a candidate anyway. That’s when doing your own research is most valuable.

This is not just an indictment of the GOP. The local Democrat party has had their missteps too.

For example, back in 2009 one of my coworkers was a LP Democrat committeeman who excitedly bragged to me one day that his party was going to put up as a township supervisor candidate a 'dynamic woman who was new to Lower Providence but not new to politics’.

I was intrigued because I was working on a campaign to elect the then-incumbent supervisor, so as soon I learned the name, I researched this woman and discovered that she was a notorious con artist who had been at the heart of a 2002-2003 scandal in Philadelphia wherein she pretended to be an heiress descended from a Revolutionary war hero, ingratiated herself into Philly high society, and used this persona to swindle a wealthy Philadelphia real estate broker out of more than $80,000 in cash and thousands more in the form of goods and services from others. She was so notorious that a couple of crime shows had done episodes about her. (See a good summary, here; this woman, who has since remarried, moved out of Lower Providence last year as the result of a foreclosure, so apparently her money management problems continue to this day. She still has an active court docket with Montgomery County as she's still paying restitution).

Anyway, I passed this information onto county GOP party leadership, who took it to Democrat party leadership, who then presented it to the candidate and asked her whether this information was true. She quietly withdrew and nobody was publicly embarrassed. 

Perhaps, like the “CARE” parents, we should have just shopped the story around to the local news media for maximum exposure and humiliation instead of handling it in a gentlemanly manner and giving the party the opportunity to address it first.  

The lesson is, if a party doesn’t do a good job vetting candidates these days, when it’s easier than ever via the Internet, the opposition (and/or public) most certainly will.  It’s not called ‘opposition research’ for nothing.

While the Worcester Republican Committee (via Worcesterpapolitics.com) apparently was quick to blame Lower Providence’s Republican Party for the Misus debacle, the offensive Facebook posts were never presented by their municipal leader, Wini Hayes, during the leadup to the joint school board endorsement meeting (or at the actual meeting) as a reason why we should not endorse Mr. Misus, even though Ms. Hayes took the lead on questioning candidates and asked each of them about the existence of unflattering or adverse information.

Given how WRC has positioned themselves (via their friends at Worcesterpapolitics.com) as somehow innocent in this, you can imagine how surprised I was to discover something that apparently escaped WRC six years ago when it endorsed current supervisor Susan Caughlan, and earlier this year when they re-endorsed her for re-election.

Ms. Caughlan (also known as Mrs. David Brooks, whom I’ve written about previously), an attorney, wrote and published an article for the William and Mary Law Review  in 1987 that defended the in-home possession and viewing of child pornography as a protected First Amendment right [you can read her argument yourself here].  This was not a random class assignment she was forced to write, it was an analysis she chose to make, write and publish.

I’m not sure how one can defend the creation or mere existence of, let alone the private possession, viewing and sharing of, child pornography anywhere, anyplace, anytime, but this woman evidently feels the framers of the Constitution envisioned this as a protected, God-given right more than two hundred years ago - as long as it occurs in the privacy of your home, of course, if I read this correctly - and attached her name to this garbage. As a Republican, as an American, as a parent, as a human, it disgusts me that WRC would hold up someone with these reprehensible views and endorse them as some sort of exemplary representative of our values, no matter when she wrote it.

In the event that Caughlan belatedly defends writing this as some sort of youth-inspired insanity, it gets worse. In the “You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep” department, I’m told she’s had a long friendship and association with recently convicted child porn purveyor (and Worcester Twp resident) John Harris. This friendship is shady especially when you consider that he has reportedly endorsed her in the past, donated money to her campaign, and records show she voted  to spend in the neighborhood of $200,000 of Worcester Township taxpayer dollars protecting his emails from discovery in a Right-To-Know case (Worcester didn't have an email system of their own at the time and now, of course, we know what kind of things were lurking in his email). And, incidentally, she’s also voted to spend taxpayer resources to battle Methacton School District in efforts to delay and restrict the installation of field lights at Methacton’s football field in an effort to prevent them from impacting nearby residents, which includes and benefits Harris, among other things.  

This friendship/association is common knowledge in and around Worcester, so why, again, was she ever endorsed? Was SHE vetted? As I mentioned above, WRC chair Wini Hayes asked Methacton school board candidates seeking a party endorsement this year if there was anything negative about themselves that they needed to explain; did she ask Caughlan the same thing at their meeting to endorse a supervisor candidate? And if so, did Caughlan ever tell WRC about this plank in her ‘conservative’ platform?

Is it any wonder, then, that the fastest growing voter identity group is “independent” and that increasingly, voters look with more favor upon UNendorsed candidates?

Political parties are made up of imperfect humans who despite the best of intentions, sometimes get it wrong. Voters have a wealth of free information easily available to them to determine who a candidate really is, what he/she is really about, and whether a candidate resonates with their values.  The fact that so many have voter apathy and abdicate the vetting responsibility to others lends validity to the saying ‘you get the government you deserve”.

Sign Language

‘Tis the season…for campaign yard signs! Nobody really likes them, but they are effective ways for candidates to gain name recognition and for residents to show support, so I suppose they aren’t going to go away.


part of my district (2-3) in LP...one sign per candidate! (2010)

As a committeeperson (who are the journeymen and women of each party who do the political grunt work on the ground to get candidates elected), one of my duties is to put out such yard signs for candidates on our ballot.

I take a lot of pride in the work I do.  I don’t put out too many signs, make sure they get replaced or stand them back up if they fall over, and I get rid of them quickly when the election is over. In  representing my own voting district,  I always ask permission from the property owner (even when they’ve allowed me to place signs previously) and I always commit to picking up signs I’ve placed as soon as the election is over because I know people don’t really like looking at them. Usually, the same evening after the polls close, and certainly no later than the next day, I’ve pulled all of mine.

Some elections are worse than others. The 2011 election was memorable for the sheer number of candidates (county commissioners, county row officers, local school boards and local township supervisors/borough commissioners) all up at the same time. With numerous candidates, the signage to promote them all was off the hook.

However, in all the years I’ve worked on campaigns or been a candidate myself, I never saw anything like what greeted me this past Saturday afternoon when I was out running errands. All up and down Ridge Pike through Lower Providence, one candidate had literally carpet-bombed us with their yard signs. There were literally 25 or 30 placed on EACH SIDE of some intersections, and spaced so closely that no other candidates’ signs (of either party, for all contests) were readable. It was a truly obnoxious display of self-promotion.

 

Worse, with the 35-mph winds that day, some of the sleeves had blown off the stakes and were flying loose into the adjacent lawns or the street.  They weren’t sunk into the ground well, so some were twisted sideways or had been blown completely over onto the ground. Some signs I’d placed within my voting district were pulled out of the ground and tossed aside in the process of this invasion.  All in all, it looked absolutely hideous and it was visually overwhelming.  

I don’t mind saying that the signs were placed by a candidate from my own party, but had anyone come to LP and done this, I’d have had the same reaction.

2-3 polling place, primary election, 2013

You should also know that it’s against the law to remove campaign yard signs you did not place, yard signs belonging to another candidate, and removing signs on private property. I believe it’s a misdemeanor and there’s a fine involved if caught and convicted. It’s also considered bad form to drop signs on someone’s property without their permission, a practice I’m aware that one of the candidates running for supervisor this year has been doing. Thus, there wasn’t much I could do myself since I was not the property owner where the signs were placed and I did not place them myself.

Outraged at this veritable trashing of our community, I contacted our municipal party leader, Jim Van Horn, who, for reasons unknown, was utterly uninterested in doing anything. I was told “there’s nothing we can do about it”.  Faced with this unwillingness to confront the perpetrator, I contacted the individual – again, a member of my own party - myself. Giving the benefit of the doubt, I explained that aside from the larger issue of what happened and how terrible it looked, I also expressed my opinion that trashing up our community this way not only made this particular candidate look bad, but it reflected poorly upon our party and my fear that disgusted voters would take it out on her and potentially other candidates on our ballot on election day. At that point I’d already heard from two voters who saw the mess after I did and had called to ask about how it came to be there.

I was frankly also fearful that my constituents who live here and friends who traverse through LP, knowing that I place campaign signs in my district, would think that I was responsible for this visual assault. No committeeperson I know of either party in this area would ever have placed this many signs in this way. Not to mention, signs aren’t cheap, and it’s waste of a resource to place so many in one area.

I am happy to report that the candidate was horrified, and relayed that a third-party contractor was purportedly hired to place their signs, but they were never told to place so many signs so closely together. The candidate agreed with my assessment and by 9:30 Sunday morning, the vast majority of them had been removed. I applaud their responsiveness and concern for our community; they communicated with me several times to assure that they’d done a good enough job of repairing the damage. While there are still a number of them around, at a ratio that I’d say is about 5:1 of every other candidate’s sign out there, it’s far better than it was.

Whatever your personal feelings about campaign yard signs, just know that come November 6, the day after the election, they’ll all be going away…until next spring’s primary!

Open Season

When you went to the polls this past Tuesday in either of the two townships served by Methacton School District, you were greeted by a sign that read as follows, courtesy of our local Democrat party:

First, aside from the obvious factual error - there are really five positions up for election in 2011, not four - the sign claimed that 'school board member is a non-partisan position'.  Really? Maybe it should be, but the truth is that they are elected positions, and the only way to get elected as a school board member is to petition to get on the ballot for one party or the other (or, as some do, cross-file and run under the banners of both parties, a process that I think really should be disallowed for any elected position,since it muddies the water as to what a candidate's true ideology is).

In fact, at the website for PSBA, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (http://www.psba.org/parents-public/board-candidates/how-to-run.asp), Federal employees are reminded that they are subject to the Hatch Act and barred from running for 'partisan elective office' such as for school board.  

This is not a homogenous position, nor should it be. I think we deserve to understand the political and fiscal philosophy that drives a potential school board member who is controlling a $91 million dollar budget made up of your federal, state and local tax dollars. Personally, recognizing that while we all want the best for our students,  I prefer to see fiscal conservatives in the seats who understand that we want the best education and resources we can afford, not someone who thinks this is still 2005 and every household in the district has unlimited affluence.

Now, if the Democrats are truly open to considering ANY qualified candidate, and endorsing them without requiring them to switch party affiliation, I'm all for it. In the past, there were qualified Republicans who were rebuffed by their own party in favor of  candidates who were Democrats until immediately prior to filing their petitions to run as Republicans, and who were clearly favored over the known fiscally conservative proclivities of the authentic Republican candidates because the former Democrats were believed to be more likely to push through approval and spending to build the new 5-6 school, which they ultimately did. Folks, that project alone is costing so much money that we will won't even begin to start paying down principal until 2018. That's 5 years AFTER my sophomore student graduates.

I certainly hope this isn't the case in these recessionary times, but perhaps those Republican candidates - some of whom are still interested in running - will find more support from the other side of the table than they got (or may get) from their own. I know our side doesn't exactly have people leaping out of the woodwork to take on the free-spending legacy left to us by some members of the current and immediate past school boards, and I have to believe this newfound openness to outsiders by the Democrats is at least in part driven by a similar lack of viable candidates on their side as well.

Whoever runs in 2011, candidates are needed who are not afraid to make some tough decisions over the next several years.The 2012 budget is already shaping up to have serious gaps, and increasing taxes at a time of high unemployment is not the answer. Difficult choices will have to be made about more services to be cut, and no matter what is done, people will be unhappy. Both parties should look to find candidates with the backbone to do it and the stomach for dealing with the grief it will cause.

By the way, if you're thinking of throwing your hat into the ring on either side of the ticket, you may never have less competition. Although you may find yourself running as a Republican endorsed by Democrats!