With a little more than a month to go, what’s left of the Congressional campaign promises to be the nastiest, most entertaining political spectacle in many a year. Your editor covered the political scene himself as a fledgling reporter for the Atlantic City Press, and at times it was quite a thrill. The highlight of one particularly heated mayoral election that drew 32 candidates was when one of them jumped on the back of the police chief and sank his teeth into the cop’s head. In the end, the man who won the race subsequently went to prison — nothing unusual for Atlantic City, since that’s where most of the town’s mayors (and quite a few city supervisors as well) wound up during the stretch of years between 1970 and 1990 that included the creation of the town’s ill-fated casino business.
Even by Atlantic City standards, though, the rough and tumble of this year’s congressional elections is something to behold. On Wednesday, New York Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino threatened to “take out” a New York Post reporter who’d asked Paladino to prove his accusation that Democratic challenger Andrew Cuomo had cheated on his now-ex wife. Paladino ducked the question and asked the reporter about a “goon” the Post had sent to photograph his daughter, who reportedly was born to a mistress and kept secret from his wife for a decade. Whom do you root for in these exchanges? Probably half of the Post’s editorial staff really are goons – overweening, egregiously misguided muckrakers who would sell their children for an exclusive interview with…Lindsay Lohan. Paladino didn’t specify how he would make good on his threat, but if he should succeed, having one fewer editorial hack in this world would probably not be such a terrible thing.
Allred Smear Tactics
Over on the West Coast, publicity hound and erstwhile attorney Gloria Allred was busy executing a smear campaign against Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. With a straight face, Allred claimed that her client, one Nicki Diaz, Whitman’s housekeeper for nine years, had been abused and that Whitman had known all along that the woman was an illegal alien. Although the evidence strongly suggested that Allred and her client were lying, Allred has had so much practice at it that Whitman had her hands full batting away the charges. However, it didn’t help Allred’s case that Diaz apparently had been paid $23 an hour by Whitman, or that Diaz’s immigration papers were convincing forgeries. Did we mention that Allred has financially backed the campaign of Whitman’s opponent, Jerry Brown?
We look forward to a raucous month of campaigning, one harkening back to the days of Aaron Burr. We wouldn’t be entirely surprised if there were a homicide along the way — or if the murder strikes at least some voters as an act justified by principle.
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…incoherent…