The End of the Line
Charles Lollar’s year started during his quixotic campaign for Governor of Maryland. It was, shall we say, not a productive campaign for Mr. Lollar:
- Their campaign bus had Delaware plates;
- They could not adequately file the appropriate paperwork regarding the New Day PAC;
- Lollar loyalists fled the campaign;
- Charles had tax issues, if you recall, from his car registration in Florida;
- Charles received thousands in reimbursements from his campaign coffers;
- His campaign staffed engaged in ugly, gutter politics;
- Lollar and Timmerman can’t agree on Lollar’s marijuana policy;
- They missed by a month the deadline to apply for public campaign financing;
- Lollar himself has left the door open for tax hikes and taken three different positions on the Purple Line project;
- Got sued by a vendor for breach of contract and lost;
- His former campaign manager had missing in-kind contributions for the work of their employees;
Eventually, Lollar finished a distant third in the Republican Primary. However, Lollar did find himself with an unexpected second chance. Lollar was substituted into the race for the Charles County Commission, a move that was applauded even by me. Unfortunately for Lollar, the race had a familiar outcome:
In what turned out to be the most competitive race for the slot for a space on the Charles County commissioners board, incumbent Ken Robinson (D) in District 1 squeaked by with 25,467 votes, 57 percent, beating out former gubernatorial GOP candidate Charles Lollar, who had 19,112 votes, 42.7 percent.
It’s unfortunate that Lollar lost, because Charles County is becoming a bluer county by the day. Lollar (who was touted by supporters as “the only candidate who could beat Anthony Brown”) actually finished behind Larry Hogan’s total in the district. But the most damning thing of all for Lollar is that he repeated one of the same mistakes in the County Commissioner General Election that he did in the Gubernatorial Primary Election:
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“Charter government is currently not the right thing for Charles County,” Lollar said.
However, in his Oct. 8 email answer to a questionnaire from the Independent, answers from which were published Oct. 22 in a voters guide, Lollar wrote, “I am inclined to support the proposed charter government because it contains greater checks and balances on the unrestrained budget growth we have had over the last 10 years. It will require term limits, which I believe are paramount to any system of government and it will contain clear lines of budgetary responsibility.”
Lollar did not return a call seeking clarification of his position.
Once again, we find an issue where Charles Lollar contradicted his own position on a major campaign issue. It’s become such an epidemic with Mr. Lollar that it almost seems like these contradictions are a deliberate campaign tactic of his.
Regardless of the circumstances, Charles Lollar has now lost three major elections in the course of four years, including two this year (which is a feat I don’t remember anybody having ever accomplished before). He lost a fourth if you count a local school board race he lost back in Georgia. Mr. Lollar has a distinguished record of military service, for which he should be commended. He is clearly a gifted public speaker. However when it comes to convincing people that he is capable of serving in public office he has been rejected, once by voters Republican primary voters statewide, and twice by the general electorate in Southern Maryland. There may be a place for him on the ballot in the future as a modern day perennial candidate in the vein of Ross Pierpont or John Kimble, but for all practical purposes Charles Lollar’s political career is over.
