A behind-the-scenes look at the news of Claremont, CA. We focus on city hall, city staff, and the so-called "Claremont 400" or "Preserve Claremonters" or "Claremonsters", those goofy, too-serious, power types that run most of the town's service organizations, charities, and city commissions. Claremont is indeed a unique place, and we'll try to bring a flavor of that absurd "uniqueness" to the outside world, as well as spotlighting some of the finer things about our city and region.
Showing posts with label Claremont Democratic Club. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Claremont Democratic Club. Show all posts
The unofficial results from Claremont's municipal election are in, and the winners are:
SAM PEDROZA - 24.3%, 3,336 votes OPANYI NASIALI - 19.7%, 2,697 JOSEPH LYONS - 18%, 2,470
Robin Haulman ended up with 2,275 (16.6%) , or 195 votes behind Lyons. Jay Pocock had 1,430 votes (10.4%). You can see the vote totals here.
Haulman's loss was a bit surprising. She was the Claremont 400 candidate of choice, and the turnout was a pretty low 23.9%, which usually favors the 400. Haulman actually outpolled Lyons in most of the precincts' absentee ballot totals. But among yesterday's voters, she lost to Lyons, the 400's backup candidate. So perhaps the combination of missteps by Haulman and her campaign together with Bob Gerecke's dirty tricks changed voters' minds about Haulman by the end of the election.
Incidentally, a glance at today's Claremont Courier informs us that Lynn Savitzky and Cynthia Humes, two of the seven signers of that Bob Gerecke attack ad against Opanyi Nasiali, have disavowed any knowledge of the ad (image, left - click to enlarge).
Apparently, Gerecke and the Claremont Democratic Club, which was circulating the ad at the Claremont Farmers Market last Sunday, used Humes' and Savitsky's names without their permission. As always, Bob is a real class act.
No one's said anything about this, but Sam Pedroza, just as he did in 2007 with Preserve Claremont, enjoyed the benefit of the attack ad without having to take any responsibility for it. He had the full support of the people behind the ad. Gerecke and the Democratic Club endorsed Pedroza, walked precincts for him, and conducted phone banking in support of Sam.
And, just as he did in 2007, back when he had a little more solid backing from the 400, Pedroza ignored the clean campaigning pledge he and the other candidates signed. Another minor commentary on Sam and the worth of his word.
Follow-up Smear Email by Former Claremont Democratic Club President. Believes Claremont Voters are Morons
Thursday (yesterday) found Bob Gerecke (right) still hyperventilating over the Opanyi Nasiali satire piece done in the Daily Bulletin and Claremont Courier last summer.
He sent a follow-up email to some of his friends in Claremont (OMG, does he have any?) that someone forwarded to us. See below.
Apparently he thinks this is the stick he needs to beat that mad dog Nasiali and clear the way for his city council favored candidates, Joe Lyons and Robin Haulman. Gerecke is almost a one-man mudslinging machine on this subject, getting by with a little help from his friends in the original ad (see list at end of post).
As we indicated yesterday, his is a completely cock-eyed view of Nasiali's piece. In fact, in his email, he can't decide what is serious and what is satire. He ascribes an almost unbelievable cleverness to Nasiali, as if Nasiali were writing in code to some people that most of us couldn't crack. Luckily he is riding to the rescue on his hobby-horse with a decoder ring and emails blazing.
Notice the list of scandalous statements ascribed in the email to Nasiali: this time he extracts them and removes the satiric punchlines, knowing most in his audience won't bother to look at the original for context. Oh, a clever guy, that Bob is. Almost as unbelievably clever as Nasiali
This whole thing is laughable except that it does have one serious point. It shows the extent of desperate action Gerecke will take when he thinks his candidates might not make the grade. It shows his unrestrained willingness to engage in sleazy campaigning.
It's amazing he believes anybody in town will buy what he is selling. He must think the total IQ of the town is somewhere south of room temperature. Gerecke (and his fellow-travelers who signed the original ad--listed below) should be objects of scorn, or pity, or both.
Here is the email:
From: xxxxxxx xxxxxx Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2011 7:27 PM To: claremontbuzz@yahoo.com Subject: FW: RECENT BIZARRE STATEMENTS BY A COUNCIL CANDIDATE
Buzz: FYI. Another stinkbomb from Bob Gerecke.
------ Forwarded Message From: Bob Gerecke Reply-To: Bob Gerecke Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2011 17:58:38 -0800 To: xxxxxxxxxx Subject: RECENT BIZARRE STATEMENTS BY A COUNCIL CANDIDATE
Hi, [redacted]
This adds information to what was in Wednesday's Courier; it's also written for those who didn't see the Courier.
PLEASE SHARE THIS WITH ALL OF YOUR CLAREMONT FRIENDS.
As a concerned Claremont citizen, I was shocked to discover startling statements authored by Mr. Opanyi Nasiali, candidate for Claremont City Council, which were published on September 2, 2010 in the Opinion section of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. This article is available online in the newspaper’s archives and was re-printed in full in Wednesday’s Claremont Courier, page 18. Opanyi’s article, titled “Ways to Cut Government Spending,” included strange proposals that defy any definition of a responsible elected official. His proposals included the following, here extracted and quoted verbatim from his article:
· “Eliminate the police and let all citizens arm themselves.”
· “Eliminate public schools so that all children are home-schooled, if not in private schools!”
· “Get rid of Social Security.”
· “No public mass transportation facilities.”
· “Stop government subsidies to small businesses.”
· “Do not spend any money on research.”
· “Do not spend money on space exploration.”
· “Unemployment benefits? They cost too much.”
In two recent candidate forums, Opanyi said that he opposes restoring the cuts to our police department, and he repeated his preference for armed citizen self-policing – after all, it worked in the rural Kenyan village in which he was born! Despite his statement to some voters that he was writing "tongue in cheek", he really sympathizes with the most extreme of the views he expressed.
He wrote the piece quite cleverly, allowing himself to describe it as serious to those who like his proposals and as "tongue in cheek" to those who don't. Some of his points seem to come from the ultra-right agenda, but others appear to parody it. So, was Opanyi serious about some of his proposals but not about others? Or about all? Or about none? Does he himself see a distinction between ideas which are wacky and those which are simply very "small government"?
We can only imagine the chaotic effects on the work of the Claremont City Council, and the impacts on the public good of Claremont, if a person of such bizarre thinking were to be elected. I urge Claremont voters to give attention to the kind of thinking that delivered these proposals, and decide whether there is any place for it in Claremont City government.
PLEASE SHARE THIS WITH ALL OF YOUR CLAREMONT FRIENDS.
AS VOTERS, THEY HAVE A RIGHT AND A NEED TO KNOW.
THANKS VERY MUCH.
-- Bob Gerecke
* * * * *
Signers of the original ad:
Ann Joslin Bob Gerecke Cynthia Humes Jim Antonich Lynn Savitzky Roy Durnal Sally Alexander
Elections bring out the worst in the Claremont 400, who would do just about anything to keep control of this silly little town. Some of the campaign theatrics seem to have been lifted directly from infomercials or patent medicine salesmen. For instance, at the 2009 election kick-off party for former Claremont Assistant City Manager Bridget Healy, one of her supporters, Ken Corhan of Measure CL fame, got up and asked a question, acting as if he were just some random member of the public rather than one of the people who signed Healy's nomination papers.
Witness the traditional candidate forums, of which there are many. The most important of these, or at least the ones with the largest attendance, are the Claremont Chamber of Commerce, Active Claremont and the League of Women Voters of the Claremont Area.
The first two of those organizations have already held their events. The LWV candidate forum is Thursday, February 17, in the Padua Room of the City's Alexander Hughes Community Center.
In the past, the LWV forum has seemed to favor the Claremont 400 candidates, often by picking questions that highlighted their candidates' issues and by avoiding those that might bring their friends harsher scrutiny. In contrast, the Active Claremont forum has been something like the People's Choice Awards, with the audience presenting questions to the candidates.
The AC website has video of their January 19 forum posted online. You can download the video file and, if you're into self-flagellation, you can watch the entire one hour and fifty-four minutes. One interesting change the AC board made this year was to allow the audience members to ask the questions themselves, rather than writing them down on index cards as has been the past practice.
This change worked out well for one audience member, Mel Boynton (photo, right). Boynton took the mic and asked the following:
I'd like each of the candidates to address what you know about the Youth and Family Committee and its 11 goals for working with the school district, the City and non-profits and what you'd bring to the table to make that, uh, increase the quality of life for our youth and family [sic].
How many candidates would be able to enumerate even one of the those eleven Youth and Family Master plan goals, which appeared in the amended YFMP in 2007? Of all the many issues facing Claremont how could a candidate have known to prepare for a question like the one posed by Boynton?
It turned out that only one of them could give the sort of answer Boynton was fishing for. That person was Robin Haulman, who ticked off nine of the 11 Youth and Family Committee goals, virtually word for word, from page 15 of the YFMP's action plan. Haulman didn't even bother to memorize the 11 goals. She just turned to a page in the notebook she referred to throughout the debate and, with the aid of her reading glasses, simply read straight from the YFMP action plan.
Even with the aid of crib notes, Haulman got only nine of the 11 goals and didn't even bother to answer the second part of Boynton's question. So, while we can count on Haulman to know some of the goals, if elected she won't do anything to improve the quality of life for our youth and families. The takeaway was that Haulman does fine when she can recite text, but she can't put an answer into context, which qualifies her as the perfect Claremont 400 marionette.
Here's a video clip of Boynton's question, followed by Haulman's response (watch Haulman looking for the right page to read from as Boynton asks his question):
And, just for your reference, here's the section of the YFMP that Haulman lifted her answer from. If you print it out and read along as you watch the video, you can see just how closely her answer matches the list:
Click Image to Enlarge
How do we know Boynton is hooked up with the 400? Well, for one thing, Boynton was listed as a Bridget Healy supporter in 2009. And he's supporting Sam Pedroza, Robin Haulman and Joseph Lyons this time around.
Coincidentally (or not) Boynton is on the board of the Pomona Valley chapter of the United Nations Association of the US, which had as its last speaker Joseph Lyon's campaign treasurer, J. Michael Fay. Fay, you'll recall, was also the treasurer for the Yes on CL school bond campaign last November. Another board member (and current president) is Katie Gerecke, who has served as a Claremont League of Women Voter's president and whose husband Bob is a past president of the Claremont Democratic Club.
Also, as he said in his introduction to his question, Boynton is a member of the City's Youth and Family Committee, which includes Butch Henderson as a member. Henderson, along his wife Rosemary, is an honorary co-chair of Robin Haulman's election committee.
Boynton's question itself wouldn't be an issue if it weren't coupled by that quite specific response by Haulman. How could Haulman have known to include that one specific page out of the thousands of pages of city staff reports, memos and correspondences without some advanced notice?
We couldn't help but notice, too, that Boynton's LinkedIn page used to list "political strategies" as one of his specialties (he deleted that particular specialty after we posted this):
Boynton's CV also lists some of the organizations he belongs to. These include the Claremont United Church of Christ, where Butch Henderson was the senior pastor, and the Claremont Democratic Club, which has become the Claremonsters' tool for election outreach in what is supposed to be a non-partisan election.
So, to recap, here's what we learned from the Active Claremont forum:
We posited that a common thread is the Democratic Club of Claremont. While this idea just came to us from our knowledge and experience, it didn't take long for a reader to give us reinforcement. Said reader snapped the picture below at last Sunday's Farmers' Market, about 8 a.m. It shows the Dem. Club table set up every Sunday morning on the corner of Second and Yale, in front of the Starbucks. Usually the table is loaded with flyers, tracts, broadsides, and brochures, but when this was taken just a few signs were out. Our reader was interested in the apparent candidate trifecta: Robin Haulman on the left, school board member Mary Caenepeel in the center (sign cut down) and Sam Pedroza on the right. (The Caenepeel sign was cannibalized to provide the handwritten identification, not visible, facing Starbuck's: Democratic Club of Claremont.)
We remember in 2009 when the Democratic Club provided the footsoldiers for councilmember Larry Schroeder's campaign, and that they consistently endorse whichever candidates for this non-partisan office are Democrats, Pedroza and Elderkin in 2007 for example. So our idea is--and we see nothing here to dissuade us--that Pedroza and Haulman jumped at the chance to have the Democratic Club folks place some of their signs. By our informal count, their sign efforts seem to be lagging, after all.
Incidentally, a glance at today's Claremont Courier informs us that Lynn Savitzky and Cynthia Humes, two of the seven signers of that Bob Gerecke attack ad against Opanyi Nasiali, have disavowed any knowledge of the ad (image, left - click to enlarge).
Posts
