In a continuing series titled Lies, Lies, Anastasia Pantsios at OhioDailyBlog.com wrote last Friday:
I really hate politicians who deliberately lie about their opposition, turning their strengths into weaknesses through total fabrication, a.k.a. "swiftboating." But since most of these people are Republicans, I kind of expect it.
But I REALLY hate when Democrats lie to smear other Democrats. I don’t even know why they do it. It drains the life out of our party and kills activism. It’s unethical, and in the long run, not effective.
Anastasia is referring to Lee Fisher's scurrilous attack-campaign against Jennifer Brunner in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate nominee. But the statement equally could apply to the second-most-controversial primary race in Ohio now, a race where a succession of dirty-tactic "Establishment" party designees have attempted to take out insurgent frontrunner and populist David Krikorian in the OH-02 congressional race.
Now, one week before the May 4 Ohio Democratic Primary election, the fringe candidate who claims Establishment support, Surya Yalamanchili, has sprung a vicious smear campaign against Krikorian. The smear campaign employs a set of falsehoods first spread on "progressive" blogs including OhioDailyBlog and DailyKOS, now incorporated into push polls reportedly received by registered Democrats in Pike, Brown, and Clermont counties -- all counties where Yalamanchili is running a distant third in the three-man primary field.
It's a question as vexing as how the moon was made: Why does Jean Schmidt--the meanest, sorryest, stupidest, most useless member of Congress--continue to win elections against articulate, intelligent, high-integrity Democratic nominees?
Poll respondents agree on the answer: "SATAN." But let's get serious. One real reason is that the Republicans employ tactics, involving the use of feints and foils, schmills (Schmidt shills) and schmolls (Schmidt trolls). And elements of the Democratic Party apparatus collude, here in the heartland of Robert Taft's old "Conservative Coalition" -- an institution that never died, invented to facilitate just such collusion.
When Surya B. Yalamanchili, a 28-year old reject from Donald Trump's Apprentice show, first entered the 2010 OH-02 congressional race as an "Independent," flown in from the coast to mimic and split off votes from David Krikorian, I knew he was a schmill.
In a contest, I offered authentic Cincinnati five-way chili (the closest thing to pornography legal in Cincinnati) to the first person producing hard evidence of Yalamanchili's ties to the Republican Party (see here: http://www.dailykos.com/...
The contest is closed, and the winner is: THE FEDERAL ELECTIONS COMMISSION!!!
For those of you like Surya, who are too young to catch the reference of my alternate title, I refer you to the classic PACE Picante Sauce ad from the 80s and 90s: http://www.youtube.com/...
Actually, I'm sure that Surya is familiar with that ad, because his only tie to OH-02 is that he formerly worked a brief stint as an oil salesman ("marketing director" for Oil of Olay) at Procter & Gamble. (As a brief reminder about P&G: It's one of the most notoriously Republican companies in the country and alone accounts for why Cincinnati has been a historically Republican city; it is typically the largest advertiser in the U.S.; it routinely tops the list of consumer boycotts for its continued horrific practices of animal testing; and it's a leading company in the fight against stricter consumer and animal protection legislation.)
Last December, Yalamanchili, who calls himself "Chili" as a local-appeal marketing ploy, renounced all the epithets he had been hurling at the Democratic Party and announced he would now run in the Democratic Primary, directly challenging Krikorian, even though Yalamanchili has never been a registered Democrat and never before voted in a Democratic primary.
Now, his first finance reports to the FEC, not filed until April 15 and 20, reveal that his top eighty donors, almost all from outside of OH-02, fall neatly into three groups: management at P&G or other out-of-state companies for whom Yalamanchili has worked; the south Asian community including six donors named Yalamanchili or Jindal; and donors associated with the former campaign of Republican-turned-Democrat Stephen Black, the schmill of 2008 who savaged and damaged the eventual Democratic nominee of that year.
Specifically, of Yalamanchili's forty top donors, twenty (50%) are south Asian by name, and the other twenty include Stephen Black's wife, Susan; mother, Helen; and top fundraiser, Barbara Gould.
The Black connection is particularly interesting because Stephen Black and his father, Robert Black, both hail from the Graydon, Head and Ritchey law firm, which has represented P&G and that great schmill newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer. It is also the law firm that served as springboard for the political careers of GOP Presidential candidate Robert Taft, his grandson Ohio governor Bob Taft, and former OH-02 congressman and current US Senate candidate who will face either Brunner or Fisher, Rob Portman.
Astute readers will begin to detect some patterns here.
Until its mass "conversion" in 2008, when Stephen became a "Democrat," the Black clan -- including Stephen, Susan and Helen -- collectively supported the GOP careers of Taft, Portman, Kenneth Blackwell, and former Jim Bunning aide turned Kentucky GOP congressional candidate and wingnut novelist, Rick Robinson. In other words, Robert Black was a charter member of the Cincinnati GOP ruling junta, known colloquially as the Robert-barons.
Stephen Black and Rob Portman were law partners and political allies, and it takes no conspiracy theory to posit that Portman is the one who recruited Black to run for his old congressional seat. Portman had moved on to serve as Bush's trade secretary and OMB director. By Black's false conversion, either he could take the nomination and the congressional seat from the incompetent Schmidt, or if losing the nomination, real-Democrat Wulsin would be irreperably damaged in the process. Either way, the OH-02 seat would stay controlled by the junta of the Robert-barons of Graydon-Head, and its clientele.
One might suspect that Machiavelli was raised on five-way chili.
The 2008 Black primary campaign against Victoria Wulsin was Orwellian beyond imagination. No inversion of reality was beyond Black's scuz limit. He sent a mailer to Democrats stating that Wulsin, an MD, was accused of having "covered up unethical medical experiments" in Africa, a false charge that would later become the basis of a Schmidt television ad. Black also accused Wulsin of "supporting the Bush free trade expansion plan," which, in reality, was the plan crafted by Black's old law partner, Rob Portman. Wulsin issued a one-page rejoinder called "Setting the Record Straight," but this was anemic, and the damage to her campaign lethal.
Ironically, there has been a revisionist tendency to say that it was Krikorian's run as an Independent in 2008 that doomed Victoria Wulsin. The truth is that Krikorian had been a life-long Democrat, staunchly supported Wulsin in 2006 with direct donations and by co-hosting a fundraiser, but then saw the Wulsin-Black train wreck approaching in 2008. At first, his Independent run was designed as a counter-cut. The Rethugs had successfully split the Democratic Party in OH-02 through the disingenuous Black campaign, a campaign that pitted one wealthy Indian Hill elite against another. Krikorian countered with a populist appeal to the conservative-Independent electorate, in the process winning the highest percentage of any Independent congressional candidate in the country that year.
It was brilliant. Krikorian took a bigger bite from Schmidt than from Wulsin at a ratio of as much as five to one. It was Stephen Black who sabotaged Democratic chances in 2008, not Dave Krikorian, and in 2010, the Black-hatted mob is squarely behind the spontaneous conversion campaign of Yalamanchili.
It's split and schmill all over again.
Admirably, it was Brian Hester, a Butler-County (Boehner-district) Democrat, blogging under the name ModernEsquire, who revealed in 2007 that newly-minted Democrat Stephen Black's donor list included a "Who's Who of Ohio Republicans." You can read that expose from the archive of the now-defunct Ohio 2nd Blog here: http://blog.oh02.com/...
In a comment there, Hester wrote:
For the appearance of things, Black had no problem with the Republican Party until it started losing its appeal as a brand, and his interest and the support of the Democratic Party is rather conveniently timed. Sorry if your candidate can’t handle that some Democrats are going to wonder if he’s just being a fairweather fan of the Democratic Party, but he should expect it.
The facts are as I reported them. Black over the years given to more Republican candidates and with a greater frequency than Democratic candidates. The fact that Black may have recently in the past year wrote some bigger checks to Democrats to offset that history, doesn’t, in my opinion, change much.
What would Mr. Hester say now about Yalamanchili's copycat act, entering the race as an Independent, then switching to Democrat with Black-clan and P&G management financial support only when it became apparent that Krikorian could be stopped no other way?
Well, unfortunately, Mr. Hester became wildly over-impressed with his own skills as an investigative journalist. In the summer of 2009, long before Yalamanchili became misunderstood as a sidedish in Ohio, Hester did a search of FEC records on Krikorian and came up with a single apparent donation of a whopping $250 to the Republican Party of Virginia -- in 2004. No other GOP donations, to or from, but a host of large donations to Democratic candidates, including $1500 to Victoria Wulsin during the 2006 OH-02 campaign.
Rather than check with Krikorian about the anomalous $250, Hester fancied that he had a Pulitzer-worthy smoking gun. So on 9/9/9 (that's 666 turned upside down), Hester published a scurrilous attack on Krikorian, again under the ModernEsquire screen name, on the Buckeye State Blog (known appropriately as the BS Blog in Ohio).
I will not link to the BS Blog, because it encourages the immoderate moderator, who engages in unfair practices like unsourced stories, failure to publish corrections, and unwarranted censorship. However, the Dailykos user "shpilk" has unkindly quoted at length from the slanderous 9/9/9 post in comments to diaries, such as here: http://www.dailykos.com/... (Note: Virtually everything you read there is a a blatant falsehood or half-truth.)
Most egregiously, Hester wrote:
Krikorian's campaign committee has donated money to the Virginia Republican Party and accepted money from Bob Barr's PAC.
Note that he intentionally omits dates and amounts, because those would reveal the deception. In 2004, when the $250 "donation" was reported, THERE WAS NO KRIKORIAN CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE. Krikorian did not run for any office until his 2008 congressional bid.
Now it's true that in 2004, David Krikorian was traveling around the country as a volunteer for a longshot presidential candidate considered an extremist by many. That candidate was Howard Dean.
If Hester had checked his facts, he would have discovered that the $250 payment was misreported by the Virginia GOP as an individual donation. In fact, it was not a donation, but a fee payment for a sales booth at a state Republican convention by Krikorian's private company. That company makes and sells political novelty items like playing cards, frequently sold at the conventions of both major parties.
The donation TO Krikorian FROM Bob Barr, was $1,000 in 2008, made at a time when Barr had left the GOP for the Libertarian Party, and had become a major thorn in the GOP's side. There was no reason for Krikorian to spurn the donation.
All the other allegations made by Hester on 9/9/9 were equally half-assed. For example, Krikorian attended a few Tea Party public events IN THE COMPANY OF LOCAL DEMOCRATIC DIGNITARIES, including Hamilton County Democratic Party chairman Tim Burke and former congressman Tom Luken. Krikorian attended one Tea Party candidates forum recently that was also attended by ALL the Democratic congressional candidates, including Yalamanchili.
But the facts haven't gotten in the way of a good smear campaign. And so, Hester's false allegation that Krikorian is a Republican donor has become a core belief held by the so-called progressive bloggers of Ohio -- all half dozen of them -- who run as many websites among them, and ALL of whom live far from OH-02. The majority live in Cuyahoga County, at the opposite corner of the state, more than 250 miles away.
Only recently has Yalamanchili personally gotten into the act, spreading Hester's patented falsehoods as if they were gospel truth, in an effort to rise out of third place. Last week, Yalamanchili personally distributed a Youtube video clip to a long e-mail list of labor and Democratic Party contacts. The clip shows David Krikorian at an unidentified event, mid-statement, appearing to question the role of public-employee unions.
In his full statement, Krikorian made clear that he SUPPORTS the right of public employees to organize, and was merely highlighting the dificulty that all public officials now face in cutting budgets while respecting collective-bargaining rights. Krikorian's father was a member of the postal workers union for 22 years.
Also edited out of the clip was Yalamanchili, who attended the same event, spoke after Krikorian, and AGREED WITH EVERYTHING THAT KRIKORIAN HAD SAID.
BuckeyeStateBlog has posted the same Youtube video clip, without disclosing that Yalamanchili was the source, or that Yalamanchili has been edited out of the clip.
Likewise, the recent robocalls to Krikorian stronghold areas ask recipients their preference in the OH-02 primary race. If the person selects Krikorian, they are given the following push-poll questions:
- Would you be favorable to David Krikorian if you knew he made contributions to the Virginia Republican Party?
- Would you be favorable if you knew that Krikorian attends Tea Party events?
Now come on, people. How is this any different than the Republican-inspired treachery of the 2008 Black campaign which sabotaged Democrats up and down the ballot in OH-02? How is it any different from the cannibalism of the Lee Fisher campaign, condemned by both Anastasia Pantsios and Brian Hester as nothing but facilitation of a Rob Portman victory?
How does Surya B. Yalamanchili, the real recipient of GOP backing and never before registered as a Democrat, suddenly become the "REAL Democrat" in the race?
And if you don't like Dave Krikorian because he threatens your interests or your ego, how does that justify spreading patent lies about him?
Jennifer Brunner and Dave Krikorian are kindred spirits in this campaign. Both have become the targets of smear campaigns executed by "establishment" Democrats, but really backed by the Portman-Black dirty-tricks factory of the Graydon-Head law firm alumni club.
REAL DEMOCRATS, get a frickin' clue.
Find out more or donate at
http://ilikedave.org
NOTE: I am a volunteer supporter of the Krikorian campaign. The opinions expressed here are my own and not those of any campaign.
UPDATE: Hit-piece mailers against Krikorian, sent by Mr. Yalamanchili, started coming to registered Democrats yesterday. The verbiage precisely mimcs that of the push-poll phone calls, removing any doubt about who sponsored the push-poll.
The mailer also precisely follows the pattern of the anti-Wulsin hit-piece mailer sent by Steve Black just prior to the 2008 Democratic primary, and it's funded by many of the same individuals, with fundraising led by the same individual, Barbara Gould.
Will the ODP and the Hamilton County Democratic Party allow this tactic to become the stock in trade for its brand?
Time will tell. But the joke is: The more the Indian Hill Democratic machine attacks Krikorian as a populist upstart, the better Dave will do against Jean Schmidt in the general.