Save Newport Real News in Newport Beach
In politics, all candidates tell everyone that they want to remain positive. A politician doesn’t want to come off like a negative person. So where do all these negative ads come from that we see every two years? The dirty secret: they are friends of the candidates. With just a few exceptions, negative ads are only used against people who are already winning the race and need to be “dropped down a few points” by their opposition. The further ahead the winner is, the nastier and more outrageous the claims are.
A recent example is with a political opponent of campaign manager Dave Ellis who was arrested for supposedly having very indecent material on his computer– and I’m not talking about chain letters. Unverified rumor has it that political hot-shots actually made phone calls to the police department, telling them to hold off on the raid until reporters got there to film it all happening for their nightly broadcast. There was only one problem: it was entirely fabricated. The falsely accused victim sued afterwards, naming several people in his lawsuit, including political consultant Dave Ellis.
The mans life was ruined, and in a very rare response, the judge ordered all reference to the case expunged, and erased, from all court and law enforcement records. Holy cow! So how nasty can political races get? Well, they have proven to get at least that nasty.
A few weeks ago, a phone survey came around right here in Newport Beach asking people their opinions of political candidates– and my name was on that list.
They asked about all candidates in the two big races and hit all of them except the Dave Ellis candidates with negative questions, but the one that really stood out and was totally outlandish was when they questioned about Mike Glenn (that’s me!) – asking “would you still be inclined to vote for him if you knew he wanted to defund the US military?” Holy cow, are you serious? This question stops just shy of actually saying that I want to defund the military but that is VERY clearly the message that people heard. Aside from that being a totally irrelevant issue to someone running for council: in no way do I want to defund the military. In fact, I’ve spent I-dont-know-how-many-years volunteering for troop benefit events and raising money for our injured troops. While I generally use SaveNewport to focus on Newport-related items rather than my troop contributions, I’ve got a pretty solid record of supporting our troops— so this fabrication falls flat on its face.
But this wasn’t the extent of attacks. In fact, just last night, campaign manager Dave Ellis sent out an email to his fans with the title “Bitcoin Boy”, trying to tie in the fact that people sent me– a software developer– something called “bitcoins” several years ago, and apparently tried his best to paint them as “evil”. Is this what negative ads in Newport have come to? My bad cooking is somewhat legendary if they want an attack that has any merit.
Or, if they wanted to stick to the city council race at hand, I’ve made it easy for them: I’ve got literally THOUSANDS of pages of my opinions over the years.
THOUSANDS.
I guess if they can’t find a city issue where they want to oppose my position, then I must be doing something right!
