The Last Straw
For those of you who listened to Red Maryland Radio this week, I noted that I was having difficulty deciding between County Executive Laura Neuman and Delegate Steve Schuh in Tuesday’s primary.
The robocall from Tony ODonnell for @LauraNeumanExec is the most persuasive I have heard. Wish I had not already voted before I heard it.
— GregoryKline (@GregoryKline) June 21, 2014
This started an interesting email chain among Schuh campaign staffers that Steve Schuh himself inexplicably shared with Greg, and that Greg shared with me. See below:
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So there’s a lot of very interesting things going on here in this email chain:
- Dave Abrams, Schuh’s campaign spokesperson, has no problem calling somebody who voted for his guy an idiot;
- Steve Schuh has no problem forwarding on emails that insult county voters on to the voters who are in fact being insulted;
- The Schuh campaign accuses Tony O’Donnell of changing his mind on his endorsement; and most importantly;
- If there was any doubt that the Leopold leftovers and malcontents are trying to get their jobs back, take a look at the email addresses on this chain. The same Leopold Administration insiders who Schuh claims are merely volunteers in his campaign are in fact among the senior leadership of his campaign.
I can’t think of a more ridiculous scenario then all of this, and I have no idea why Schuh would have shared this email with Greg or why he would have spent as much time denying the role that Leopold Administration staffers had in his campaign when most of us already suspected that they were in fact among the senior members of his campaign staff. You can read up about on Messrs. Abrams and Robey from their appearance in this deposition from the John Leopold sexual harrassment investigation and trial.
It’s clear, now more than ever, that the election of Steve Schuh would mean a return to the bad old days of the John Leopold years.
Also as Mark notes, there’s the issue of insulting the people who voted for you.
Wow @Schuh2014 campaign insulting people who voted FOR him. What a bunch of tools.
— Mark Newgent (@MarkNewgent) June 22, 2014
For a campaign who seems to be down in the polls, I don’t know if this is some kind of new strategy or some sort of blowing off of steam for guys who realize that the gig is up. Steve Schuh has felt that this position is one that he is entitled to, and that a funny thing happened on the way to his coronation, and that was Laura Neuman. It explains a lot of how he has operated his campaign, all of the endorsements, all of the mail pieces, all of the scuttlebutt and the focus of this campaign. But this condescension, the exposure of the contempt that his campaign apparatus has for his supporters, and the continued denial of the importance in the campaign food chain of the former Leopold staffers is the last straw for me. As we say time and time again, Integrity Matters.
Even Steve Schuh forwarding the email on to somebody not even involved on the email chain kinda brings about a question of competence, too.
I was on the fence about who I was going to vote for on Tuesday, but not more. I cannot in good conscience site out a race or vote for a candidate in which the likelihood of the return of the years that scarred our county is high. Therefore, on Tuesday I will be voting to retain Laura Neuman as Anne Arundel County Executive.