October 18, 2004
Candidates Pile On The Criticism Of Pro-Potter PAC
But Some Try To Use It To Their Own Advantage
First, not long after we posted our previous item, the NIck Fish campaign issued a newsletter condemning the "progressive voter's guide" reportedly distributed to tens of thousands of Portlanders over the weekend. In addition to repeating Potter's own criticism of the PAC, the Fish campaign tried to use it to against their opponent Sam Adams as well.
GoPotterGo’s campaign treasurer, and the PAC's largest donor since the primary, are both Adams supporters. The PAC put out this intentionally misleading piece of literature, abusing Tom Potter’s good name and misleading voters about Nick’s progressive positions on the issues.
It seems curious to us that Fish would go out of his way to point out the candidate preference of people tied to the PAC. After all, it only makes sense that people involved with or supporting the PAC would be Adams supporters given that the PAC endorsed Adams. So the only reason we can think of to be sure to mention this is to insinuate some sort of Adams connection to the PAC and thereby tie him to the criticisms.
We should also point out that the actual door-hanger voter's guide distributed around Portland did not "[mislead] voters about Nick’s progressive positions on the issues." As far as we know from what's been reported to us (we haven't seen the actual door-hanger itself, only had it described to us), the physical voter's guide never mentions Fish, but simply endorsed Sam. It's possible that Fish's campaign was confused by the existence of some frequently asked questions tacked onto the end of the online version of the guide.
That FAQ offers some specific reasons why they endorsed Adams over Fish, and we assume those are the statements with which Fish takes issue. But for the record -- whatever one thinks of those statements -- those statements appparently only appear on the website and not in the guide that was physically distributed to Portlanders.
As for the apparent attempt by the Fish campaign to insinuate some sort of Adams-PAC connection, we turn to the coverage on KGW's website on the PAC controversy.
Adams didn’t know about the PAC or its endorsement until being informed by Northwest NewsChannel 8.
"I'm not surprised my name would be included amongst a list of progressive candidates, but it's not something until this morning I knew anything about,” Adams.
(Also mentioned in the article is the fact that Adams hadn't heard of any of this until KGW told him about it. We guess the candidate we endorsed doesn't read us on a regular basis, since we got to this story first.)
Meanwhile, the KGW article passes along Francesconi's continuing effort to tie Potter himself directly to the PAC, despite Potter's own repeated denials and requests that the PAC stop violating the principles with which Potter himself has tried to run his own campaign.
Given the mess of things the PAC has now made of all four contested Portland races, we reiterate our assessment that it's done nothing but cause problems, and little to advance any of these candidates' best interests.
Comments (1)
doretta on 19 Oct 2004
Sorry I prolonged the agony so long last time by trying to converse with them.
Since it's obvious their favorite tactic is lowering the level of the discourse to the point where everyone just generally becomes so disgusted they no longer have the will to try and tell one arguemt from another, I promise to pass this time.