20061004 Commissioner candidate Zimmer responds to Dangel

Commissioner candidate Zimmer responds to Dangel

October 4, 2006

On Carroll County Commissioner candidate Mike Zimmer’s web site, he responds to some negative campaigning by Ross Dangel.

It boggles one’s mind when folks complain about dirty and negative campaigning by being as equally negative, unpleasant and divisive. In many cases, the very folks who are doing the self-righteous complaining are the same one’s who are just as guilty of dirty and negative campaigning themselves…

In all candor, the folks who have engaged in many of the unpleasant letters to the editor, have been disappointing.

Pasted below, please find Mr. Zimmer’s response. Below that, for balance, please see Mr. Dangel’s letter to the editor…

Editor, Mt. Airy & Sykesville Gazette 10/03/06

Dear Editor:

The letter you printed on 9/28/06 from Ross Dangel contained a number of false statements.

For starters, the Republican Central Committee did not endorse me for Commissioner. As a former Central Committee member, I can assure all voters that our by-laws expressly direct neutrality during a primary.

Mr. Dangel’s statements regarding the Central Committee’s voter guide were equally mistaken. This questionnaire was issue oriented. Candidates were free to either participate or not. Commissioner Perry Jones and I both chose to respond. The majority of our answers were identical.

Now let me turn to the ugly campaign tactics that were directed toward me. A supporter of Delegate Susan Krebs attempted to smear me with a series of letters to various papers. How do I know about her Krebs association? I called the author of the letters directly and that was her explanation.

Each paper allowed me to respond and correct the record. Such false mudslinging has no legitimate place in a political campaign.

I, therefore, agree with Mr. Dangel’s final point that voters should reward candidates who stick with the issues and with the facts. That is exactly the sort of primary campaign I ran. I don’t plan on changing a thing for my General Election effort.

Very truly yours,

Michael D. Zimmer

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This campaign was full of dirty tricks

Thursday, Sept. 28, 2006

Ross Dangel, Eldersburg

Politics can be a dirty business, but this year’s primary was exemplary for its dirty tricks.

It’s little surprise that Perry Jones was unsuccessful in his re-election bid. While he was arguably outworked by many of the candidates, he was also outmaneuvered by an organized effort on the part of the Republican Central Committee to unseat all three incumbent commissioners by endorsing competitors and creating a misleading Republican voter’s guide.

Campaign sign shenanigans were just the appetizer for questionable full-page ads run the weekend before the primary by an unregistered Republican PAC (the Carroll County Republican Club) claiming to be the voice of the party.

An extremist new tabloid newspaper was also mailed to the entire county claiming official ‘‘Republican” pedigree. This newspaper accused Commissioner Jones of not residing in the county and featured the same questionable ads, which also ran in another local paper.

With such a low primary voter turn-out, all it took was a few hundred people to be deceived for this strategy to be effective.

I noticed many people bringing the deceptive Republican Central Committee’s voters guide with them into the polls. The guide intimated that candidate non-response was an effort to hide positions on issues.

There was, however, no disclosure that the questionnaire itself was done against the expressed wishes of state Republican leadership, or that candidates had been expressly asked not to respond to the questionnaire by John Kane, the head of the Republican party in Maryland.

Even the endorsement of Mike Zimmer by the central committee was done against party guidelines, which specifically require the endorsement of incumbent party candidates.

In addition to Zimmer, the central committee supported the re-election efforts of the entire incumbent delegation, with the exception of Del. Sue Krebs.

Perhaps worst of all was the misleading attack campaign waged by Larry Helminiak, now chairman-elect of the central committee. In his efforts to demonize Krebs, no fewer than six direct mail pieces containing innumerable false statements about Ms. Krebs voting record on taxes, positions on development, immigration and even the schools were mailed to all registered Republicans not listed as Krebs’ campaign supporters.

The investigations of all this primary skullduggery will surely drag-on long after the Nov. 7 election, but voters would be wise to take note of the perpetrators, so as not to reward their efforts by ever voting for them or the other candidates they worked so hard to deceive us into supporting.

These ugly campaign tactics must be eliminated, and the best way to do this is to vote for candidates who run clean campaigns and don’t resort to deceptive ads and dirty tricks.

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