By MIKE ARGENTO
So I was reading the coverage of last Tuesday’s primary and came across a comment from a vanquished candidate that made me spray coffee all over my paper.
Mike Papa, running in the Republican primary against state Rep. Keith Gillespie, accepted his loss and said, “Keith has done a great job in Harrisburg.�
Um, all due respect, Mr. Papa, but, dude, you were running against him. You’re supposed to call him names, or kill his cat, or smash the windshield of his car — not say what a great job he’s doing. You were supposed to say the election was rigged and call for a recount and complain that the voters were either too stupid to understand your campaign or too stupid to agree with your brilliant notions regarding the governance of this great commonwealth.
Of course, I could be wrong. It’s difficult to detect sarcasm in print — trust me on this one — so maybe Papa was being sarcastic and meant to say something like, “I think Rep. Gillespie — if that’s his real name — is doing such an incredibly wonderful job of guiding our state government in Harrisburg that I should be ashamed of myself for even thinking about running against him. Jerk.�
Or maybe he could have said, “Heck of a job, Gillespie!�
Don’t you people know anything about politics?
This civility nonsense has to stop. It’s bad for business.
We don’t want gracious losers. We want people like state Rep. Stephen Maitland, an Adams County Republican who lost in the primary because of his support for the legislative pay raise last year. He said he needed the money to pay for his law school tuition, which he claimed would benefit his constituents, as people were clamoring for more lawyers in the state House.
Anyway, after he lost, Maitland said, “I think the voters made a mistake.�
That’s more like it. Democracy simply doesn’t work.
His defeat could be attributed to his support of the pay raise — a real issue.
Unfortunately, that seemed to be the case in York County, where races were determined by the issues. Not one race included any allegations that somebody killed a cat or bilked a former mistress.
Sure, we had some ugliness. The race to choose the Republican to run against Democratic state Rep. Steve Stetler had some good allegations. What happened was the windshield of Larry Homsher’s car was smashed, and he said it was political — as if his opponent, Karen Emenheiser, was campaigning by breaking windows. Emenheiser denied any involvement, and Homsher never really said she was involved, only that it was political and that, apparently, the 10- and 11-year-old kids who were arrested for breaking windows in the city that night were actually agents of Emenheiser, possibly wearing clever disguises. The race was decided by nine votes and the loser, Homsher, was believed to be thinking about demanding a recount.
Now that’s political discourse!
And, of course, it wouldn’t be an election in York County if it didn’t include one candidate who was accused of committing a crime. Scott Perry, running to succeed retiring state Rep. Bruce Smith in northern York County, had been charged with doctoring reports to the state Department of Environmental Protection to cover up the alleged illegal dumping of sludge on the bank of Stony Run Creek in Monaghan Township. He admitted his involvement in court and was placed in the ARD program, reserved for first-time offenders.
Perry’s opponents brought this up, but to no avail. Perry won, therefore furthering the trend started by voters in Wrightsville of electing candidates based on their rap sheets.
That same race also included allegations that one candidate was in favor of teenage girls having abortions and was supported by a former township official who’d been charged with tax evasion.
Yet none of this comes even close to the best race of all.
It was in far-off Lebanon County, where Republican state Senate Majority Leader David “Chip� Brightbill was facing a challenge from Mike Folmer, who billed himself as “Citizen Mike,� sort of like Citizen Kane without Rosebud.
It turned ugly — well, it was pretty ugly from the get-go. But it really got nasty when Chip dragged out a woman Folmer used to sleep with — hint, she wasn’t his wife — to accuse Citizen Mike of giving her bad investment advice, which caused her to lose $10,000. She sued, according to a report in the Harrisburg Patriot-News, and received an out-of-court settlement of $2,500 from Citizen Mike’s employer.
Chip’s people said they brought her forward and made one of the nastiest political ads you’ve ever seen to call into question Citizen Mike’s fitness to serve. That it turned out that the woman had had an affair with Citizen Mike — something Citizen Mike, a true man of the people, copped to — was merely a bonus, inserting sex into what had heretofore involved only alleged fiscal chicanery.
OK, in case that wasn’t bad enough, Citizen Mike’s press secretary, Laurel Lynn Petolicchio, kind of accused Chip’s campaign of killing her cat. Laurel Lynn told the Patriot that she returned home from a meeting on May 11 and found her cat dead. (The cat’s name? Twister. Great name for a press secretary’s pet.)
She said she had no proof that Chip’s people killed Twister, but she was suspicious, the Patriot reported, “because there were Brightbill posters near her home that had not been there earlier.�
The Brightbill camp responded by saying that none of its campaign workers were in Laurel Lynn’s neighborhood, or even out campaigning, that day. Chip’s chief of staff, Erik Arneson, told the Patriot, “I can’t emphasize enough how much I love cats.�
Once again, it’s really difficult to detect sarcasm in print.
So, enough with the making nice, York County candidates. This fall, let’s see some old girlfriends and dead cats. OK?
Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.
Leave a comment