Tue Jul 21, 2009 at 18:44:37 PM PDT
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It turns out that a fellow by the name of Jason Bezis must be on the same wavelength as Progressive Sundae. On the same day last week that this blog questioned the legality of Ellen Tauscher's endorsement of Mark DeSaulnier, Bezis, a lawyer from Lafayette, filed a 17-page complaint with the State Department vis-à-vis that endorsement. Citing much of the same material as the PS post (the State Department cable banning political endorsements by presidential appointees, the prominent Tauscher endorsement on DeSaulnier's website, and the campaign brochure that features Tauscher on three of its four pages), Bezis requested the following remedy:
I believe that the State Department Legal Adviser, State Department Inspector General and/or another responsible entity (e.g., Office of Special Counsel division that enforces the Hatch Act) should require Undersecretary Tauscher to repudiate her endorsements of all candidates for partisan political office, especially in election races that are now underway. Her statement should specifically state, "I neither endorse nor oppose any candidate in the special elections of September 1, 2009 and November 3, 2009 for California's 10th Congressional District, notwithstanding any of my previous statements. I instruct all candidates for those elections to cease and desist from use of my name and likeness in campaign advertisements, broadcasts, campaign literature, and similar media where they state or imply that I have endorsed or opposed their candidacies."
Seriously... on the flip... |
| babaloo :: Seriously? |
Of course, the Garamendi campaign, eager to make political hay, tried to piggy-back onto the Bezis complaint with its own letter to Tauscher, urging her to withdraw her endorsement to save herself potential jeopardy. Josh Richman picked up the story a couple of days later, eliciting this statement from the DeSaulnier campaign:
DeSaulnier campaign spokeswoman Katie Merrill offered just one word of response today: "Seriously?"
That one-word comment probably sounds depressingly familiar to a lot of Democrats in CA-10. You see, Katie Merrill is a former Tauscher campaign staffer and, as such, has carefully honed the condescending arrogance that Tauscher practiced in responding to voters: If a constituent has a problem, never, ever acknowledge that there might be some basis for the complaint; instead, just infer that the voter is a) ignorant, b) naïve, and c) clearly worthy of contempt.
Of course, some of you may remember how well that strategy worked for Katie Merrill in her disastrous 2006 blog post at California Majority Report. That's the one where she tried to defuse progressive threats to primary Tauscher by comparing Tauscher to Joe Lieberman, earning Merrill the netroots nickname "Counterproductive Katie." Yet this is apparently the path that the DeSaulnier campaign has chosen.
Oh, and one more thing. Just to serve as a little extra validation for the position advanced in the Straight From The Horse's Mouth, Pt. 1 post, Bezis responded to questions from Richman as to whether his complaint was merely motivated by support for another candidate as follows (emphasis added):
Bezis wrote back to me overnight, stating he'd endorsed DeSaulnier early on but revoked that endorsement "motivated in part by the campaign literature touting Ellen Tauscher's backing of his campaign."
Seriously. |
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