Slapshot
Linda Parks’ rocky road
By Shane Cohn 05/17/2012
When I was a child, my dad voted for Donald Duck one year. Not sure if that’s the truth, but that’s what he claimed some decades ago after casting his vote on Election Day.
After getting over the initial thrill of imagining Huey, Dewey and Louie in the cabinet, I was finally able to ask why he voted for Mr. Duck.
His response: “Because the rest of them are assholes.”
To the best of my memory, my old man didn’t hang with politicians, or attend candidate forums. But if our mailbox was filled with the type of trash the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has been sending lately, it’s easy to understand why he summed up politics as one collective orifice.
The committee and the House Majority PAC combined have spent a little more than $60,000 in three mailer campaigns, including one that suggests “Linda Parks comes from a long line of Republicans.” and has pictures of her alongside Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Rush Limbaugh, to name a few. Another mailer presents rudimentary Photoshopped images alleging she has a closet full of Republican paraphernalia, urging voters to “Stop the Tea Party.”
In 2010, the Ventura County Republican Party tried to smear then-registered Republican Linda Parks in her fight for re-election for Ventura County Supervisor against termed out Assemblywoman Audra Strickland, R-Moorpark.
Parks, registered as “no party preference” and a candidate for the new 26th Congressional District, poses the biggest threat to the Democratic machine’s top candidate, Julia Brownley. With the new top-two primary system, the two candidates who receive the most votes move on to the November election. Republican Tony Strickland is a shoo-in, as he is the only Republican candidate on the ticket and can raise money like a televangelist on Good Friday.
That leaves Brownley, Parks and three other Democratic candidates to battle for the final spot. The other Democratic candidates will surely siphon votes from Brownley, and this has the Democratic machine worried that Parks, who was recently endorsed by the Los Angeles Times, will gain enough traction to move on to the November election.
In response, the DCCC showed that what they lack in creativity, they make up for in hypocrisy by using nearly the same attack rhetoric the Ventura County Republican Party used to slam Parks during her successful 2010 Ventura County Supervisor campaign against Audra Strickland, Tony’s wife. (See photos.) Taking it even further, the DCCC published an 80-page report detailing Parks’ private and public life and published it on the Web, along with video content of Parks that can be downloaded if anybody feels like making a negative video about her.
Even Tony Strickland said that what the DCCC is doing is shameful! That’s like Larry Flynt telling somebody their naughty pictures are tasteless.
The irony of it all is that it makes Parks’ decision to register “no party preference” all the more laudable. She is running a positive campaign, refusing special interest money and posing one heck of a threat to advance to the general election. While Parks can drive voters up the wall for declining to state who would receive her vote for speaker of the house, president or where she stands, exactly, on some public policy issues, she has shown a touch of class while walking the middle road as the Left and Right show that their true colors are actually one and the same.
Slapshot is a monthly column/op-ed piece on various issues around Ventura County.
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