The voters proved it true this week.
The candidate with the most amount of money to spend wins. A sad commentary in this age with unlimited finance contributions about to hit the end of August. Not the candidate who will truly do good for the 73rd district or the state of MO, but the candidate who spent the most.
The Voters Ignored:
1. FISCAL & ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY
Over $40,000 in contributions was funneled – ignoring current campaign finance limits. A Missouri Ethics Commission complaint against the candidate is pending. Over $100,000 was loaned to the candidate’s committee by himself. The candidate ended the primary race with over $20,000 debt. He payed 16 people to work for him on election day (one of them talked about it at my polling place).
2. USED HIS FAMILY
The candidate indicated that his late great aunt, Sue Shear, would have been supportive of his race – a woman who worked hard to put progressive WOMEN in office. His campaign materials neglected this point and blatantly exploited the Sue Shear Institute at UMSL until they blew the whistle on him. He used the endorsement of his second cousins who all live out of state to further capitalize on her name.
3. IGNORED HIS OWN ADVICE
As a self-professed environmental candidate, he forgot that paper waste contributes ill will to our planet. He mailed almost 20 mailings and dropped endless flyers at the doors – with only one on recycled paper – yep, the Environmental piece that had Tips, no less, on how to save our planet. He and his wife own 2 SUV’s and you can bet there is no reduction of energy in his own house and office or a recycling program or anything to indicates he listens to his own advice.
4. FORGOT TO DO HIS HOMEWORK
Great issues in theory. The candidate forgot to look at the declining state revenue. How is he going to “Stand up to Big Oil” and “bring green-collar jobs to the St. Louis Region” as he says on his one of his mailings? He forgot to explain to the voters how he is going to do anything he advocates. He wants to offer incentives – which I read as tax credits – to help buy energy efficient appliances, etc. – but doesn’t that just decrease our state revenue even further???
I talked with this candidate numerous times when he would not stop coming to my door in the southern part of the district. He could not answer my questions about HOW he was going to accomplish anything but just mentioned that he was in tight with Jay Nixon. When I asked him about his opponent, he first told me that he didn’t have one and the next week he told me that the other candidate was inexperienced and probably a Republican. I found out later that this was untrue.
I am sick that my district, after terrific representation by several state representatives, who always promptly returned my calls and helped me when I had trouble with a state department. In fact both of them helped me actually solve a problem with my home. I do not expect this Democratic candidate to ever return a phone call unless he is looking for a vote.
State representatives are supposed to HELP people. My district just lost- now we have to help ourselves in this troubling economy where my neighbor lost his job and my wife’s family is losing their state health care. It is going to be quite painful to watch this candidate spend even MORE of someone’s money to win in November.
If he has so much, why doesn’t he use it to actually HELP his community instead of just adding a title to his name?
And they wonder why people lose interest in voting locally.
…sometimes. Welcome to the big leagues. You work hard for your candidate (you did, didn’t you? I’m assuming you did) and then you realize it didn’t take place in a vacuum. Somebody else was working just as hard or harder for their candidate. Somebody else had more resources, more signs, more mail, more volunteers, whatever – or not.
This was your result:
[emphasis added]
Did you learn any practical lessons you can apply in the future? Did you put resources in places that weren’t as effective as you thought they’d be? Did you try something that worked really well, but in retrospect you realize that you didn’t put enough resources there to get the job done? I’m assuming through all of this that you were active in the campaign of your chosen candidate. Because if you weren’t, I’d be wondering why you were complaining.
That tells us all something. This was a hard working candidate. He not only hit the doors in the district once, he hit them “numerous times.” Wow. I wish all Democrats did that. How many times did his primary opponent knock on your door? If your answer is, “zero,” that tells us all something, too.
Uh, the three most important things in a campaign of this scope are directt mail, direct mail, and direct mail (yes, I know, personal contact is really the most important). It works. You communicate your message to the voters in this fashion. What you’re doing here is criticizing a candidate for running an effective textbook mail plan for his campaign.
Now, you’re probably new around here. This is how we do business. If you’re going to criticize someone for a specific action, you link to the evidence (so we can check it out for ourselves), or you provide it to us (scan it and put it in your post). There are instructions to do that under Diary Formatting Tips on the upper right.
How do you know about the Ethics Commission complaint? Did you or someone you know file it? At any rate, it’s not particularly troubling because people file Ethics Commission complaints all the time. It’s only troubling when the commission rules that there was a violation. There is a distinct difference.
Candidates loan money to their campaigns. Candaidate’s campaigns go into debt (they’re called “debt service committees” – you see them all the time on the Missouri Ethics Commission web site). For instance, Claire McCaskill’s gubernatorial campaign debt service committee terminated on June 17, 2008. Uh, campaigns pay people to work for them. They do things that need to get done. It’s usually in the candidates internal campaign plan. The reality is that volunteers are great, but that for all campaigns they cannot be relied on to accomplish essential time critical tasks in every instance. Sometimes people just don’t show up. If you have paid staff they don’t get paid if they don’t show up. It’s usually a good incentive to get the job done.
In case it’s news to you, all candidates use their families. It’s called a “support network.” Smart candidates contact their families (even out of state/out of district) and ask them for help. Families do that. All candidates exploit their past associations, their friends, you name it.
Give us the link about the institute, then maybe I’ll gasp and clutch my pearls, or not.
Use the lessons you learned from this campaign for the next one. There’s a pragmatic aspect to this politics thing. The first thing you have to do is win. Then you can try and accomplish things.
And finally, the good (or even marginal) is not the enemy of the perfect.
Welcome to the big leagues.
I have family who live in that district and they complained mightily about Brown and his campaign and the amount of money he was spending. And his obnoxious mailers. And they recognized that it was going to work because he had the money to build name recognition. Unfortunately.
We can talk all we want about becoming part of the system and working hard for candidates yadda yadda yadda … but money is what runs the system. I’m not saying it is ever going to change – after all, the founding fathers were monied men. But I’m not going to pretend that getting out and working hard for someone you believe in is going to change the result against a well-financed candidate who has no big media worthy negatives in his past.
imo opinion it’s perfectly fine to complain about the result. Especially at a site that is trying not JUST for Democrats but for better Democrats. Go ahead and vent 🙂