(1888PressRelease)
October 10, 2006 - Mary Jo Kilroy Campaign Showing Chinks In Its Armor
by Stewart Smalls
Dateline, Columbus, Oh: Candidate for the Ohio 15th District for the U.S. House of Representatives, Mary Jo Kilroy, has become somewhat of a political darling as of late. In the wake of GOP scandals that have rocked Washington, she, like other Democrats, has made quick work of taking advantage of the overall sour tone that has Republicans worried nationwide. In the state that gave Bush the White House in the last election, this race now has national attention. Kilroy's even posed for photos with Senator John Kerry who made a campaign stop in Columbus last week to support her and other Ohio Democratic candidates.
Once thought to be a secure seat for the GOP majority, held by long term incumbent, Deborah Pryce, the 15th District has become up for grabs with Kilroy having a chance at accomplishing an upset in November. According to the Ohio News Network, the race is in a dead heat http://www.ohioelects.com/?story=dispatch/2006/09/28/20060928-C6-03.html as of September 28th. At least that has been the thinking until now. Recently, however, a few chinks in the Kilroy armour have started to show, and the local media, once giving Kilroy a free ride, is starting to take notice.
The point at which the breaks began to show seems to be an ad from the Kilroy camp that claims that Deborah Pryce cut $14 billion in veterans benefits, at a time that veterans funding has grown from $46 billion in 2000 to $71.5 billion in 2006. The Columbus daily newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch, found out that Kilroy had fudged the numbers with some fuzzy math:
“The ad also charges that Pryce cuts veterans benefits, drawing on Democratic criticism that the 2004 budget crafted by the GOP added $14 billion less over 10 years to veterans benefits than what was sought by Democrats.”
In other words, it wasn't a cut in funding, it was just not the increase that the Democrats wanted.
This past Saturday morning, on 610 WTVN radio's popular Saturday morning call in show, many callers were complaining about how they were finding out about Kilroy's distortions in her advertising. Up until then, there were few callers talking about her and most that were, were supporters.
"Look, she says she balanced 14 budgets," one caller began, "but she's only been a Franklin County Commissioner for 6 years. So she's adding in the budgets that she had when she was on the school board as well and that's not fair. Besides, she raised taxes to balance the county budget when she said that she wasn't going to, and they had to do school levies for the school budgets. Those numbers were way out of whack when she was there."
Other callers said that they just didn't know enough about her to feel comfortable, a sign that she can only go so far with her unruly mop of hair and a girlish grin while surfing on the tide of Bush discontent. The fact that she's married and yet doesn't use her husband's name, a practice usually reserved for Hollywood celebrities and rock stars, had others questioning her credibility.
This problem has been worsened by her simplistic rhetoric and no offering of solutions. On real issues, her campaign has been silent, refusing to state policy positions even when requested by Project Vote Smart, which seeks to get politicians running for office to clearly state their positions on the issues http://www.vote-smart.org/index.htm . According to them, "Mary Jo Kilroy has repeatedly refused to provide any responses to citizens on issues through the 2006 National Political Awareness Test when asked to do so by key national leaders of both major parties including John McCain, Republican Senator Geraldine Ferraro, Former Democratic Congresswoman, Michael Dukakis, Former Democratic Governor, Bill Frenzel, Former Republican Congressman, Richard Kimball, Project Vote Smart President" http://www.vote-smart.org/npat.php?can_id=MOH77777
That kind of stinginess with positional data makes the charges that the Pryce campaign has claimed, of Kilroy having something to hide, have legs, even if only little ones http://www.pryce4congress.com/blog/?p=49 . Kilroy has been avoiding Pryce's calls for a debate and even has been cancelling luncheon appearances to avoid her. One can't be faulted for thinking that Kilroy is acting a bit like she's running scared, except no one seems to be able to put a finger on why - yet.
In the meantime, signs that Kilroy feels that she may not have enough to beat Pryce, without stretching the truth, extends beyond her own camp and into the Ohio Democratic Party itself, which in July filed a bogus complaint to the Federal Election Commission according to WCPO in Cincinnati http://www.wcpo.com/news/2006/local/07/25/oh_pryce.html . The ODP claimed that a 30-second spot, running on cable channels in central Ohio, didn't have the proper disclaimer when it ran on Fox News in Columbus at 5:18 on a Saturday evening. Pryce campaign manager John Destefano said that a printed message at the end of the ad says Pryce approved it and her campaign paid for it. He also had Time Warner Cable send a message to the Associated Press that confirmed that, that one time, the cable channel had clipped off the disclaimer by mistake.
The fact that the ODP would go to the trouble of tattle-telling on the Pryce campaign, over a technical glitch in a broadcast of the spot, is telling in and of itself. Simply waiting to see if it happened more than once, to confirm whether the spot was properly attributed, would have been enough and saved a lot of time and energy. Perhaps the ODP and the Kilroy camp have alot of extra energy these days. The nervous kind.
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