IL-14: All the Childish Pranks that Money Can Buy
Wed Jan 30, 2008 at 07:11:11 PM PDT
Ok, so, I just got off the phone with Jim Green, campaign manager for Jotham Stein.. And, no, for those of you wondering, I am not switching loyalties, I am still a Laesch supporter. But I heard the most incredible rumor, and decided I had to follow up on it.
The rumor, in a nutshell, was this: I heard that someone in the Foster campaign had taken recently to drawing faces and scrawling messages on Stein’s first mailer, which depicts Stein arms raised, crying out for change, and faxing them over to the Stein campaign.
I figured maybe some quite young Foster volunteer had amused himself by drawing one or two such caricatures and faxing them over. I know, as does anyone who has worked on a campaign, that you can’t control every single last thing your volunteers do. So I called Green to follow up, but the facts of the case, as he related them, really surprised me.
According to Jim Green, the Stein campaign has received not a couple of these, but nineteen of them. The first dated January 11 and the most recent received today. "Dated?" I asked. "Is there a fax stamp on them showing they were sent from the Foster campaign?"
"Yes," said Green, "they're signed by Tom Bowen."
While I was still trying to take in the fact that Bill Foster’s campaign manager, who has complained publicly about the stresses of this campaign and the inability to get Foster’s website updated with actual positions, like so:
Again, fair point (3+ / 0-)
We are bad at updating the issue page, i wholeheartedly admit that one. There will be lots of changes soon when I get more staff, but right now the priorities are different than the issue section. We have to get on the ballot.
by BillFoster4Congress on Fri Dec 07, 2007 at 04:25:01 PM CST
[ Parent ]
has time to sit about these days and draw funnies bashing a fellow Dem candidate and fax them over to them on a daily basis, Green went on.
He said that when they received the first one, they laughed it off. "Hey, we have a sense of humor," he said. But as time went on and they became an onslaught, Green said they started to just seem like harassment. I asked him for a copy of at least one, but he said his candidate is (understandably I think) reluctant to share a graphic with the world that is designed to belittle and demean him.
At about that point, Green echoed my thoughts on how the Foster campaign could possibly be finding the time, six days out from an election, to spare their actual campaign manager to engage in this kind of nonsense. Hey, he didn’t need to tell me: I’ve worked, all the way through to the end of a congressional campaign as a senior staffer. This close to election day no one on senior staff in a campaign sleeps.
No one sees Foster, no one gets to talk to Foster. The base in the district is pretty clearly with Laesch. Heh, as I acknowledged to Green, Stein is working hard enough at going out and trying to meet voters and answer their questions that even my own daughter told me she met Stein in Wendy’s yesterday.
Yet we are persistently being told that Foster’s campaign is the "credible" and "viable" and "serious" one in the district.
Yeah? You know why?
Money. That’s what Foster’s got. And he seems to be feeling the need to dump ever-escalating sums of it suddenly into his campaign. I just verified with both Green, and Laesch’s campaign manager, that they received notification today that Foster had dumped another $235,000 into his campaign yesterday, bringing his total loans and donations to himself over the last week alone to $370,000.
Hey, he has seventy new field staff in his employ to pay – I thought, when I read that, it must be to get out the vote for him, since, unlike Laesch, and I presume Stein, I know he doesn’t have the volunteer base to do it. But now I wonder if Foster doesn’t need them so that the Foster campaign manager can gets lots of sleep to ensure he’s fresh in the morning for that day’s round of pranks.
Or, as Green put it, "Foster is apparently spending all this cash for Tom to harass us."
This is a serious campaign people. This is the one to watch you know. All the DC insiders say so.
Meanwhile, here on the ground in IL-14, while Bowen is drawing cartoons to the tune of $1.4 million, Stein is meeting with my uninsured daughter in Wendy’s, Laesch is conducting a health care forum, our neighbor’s kids are dyingin the war that Bush forgot , Illinois has just earned the dubious distinction of being on the list of top ten states for foreclosures, and I am working my ass off like all the other Laesch volunteers.
Let the good times roll.
Cross-posted to Prarie State Blue and MyDD
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