When I came home Monday night I found the following message on my answering machine:
THIS IS A VOTER ALERT!
Our councilman, Sal DiCiccio, is being attacked in a smear campaign by a desperate opponent who is calling in BIG Las Vegas political money to back her struggling campaign. This is what you and I hate about politics. Get ready for the lies and the dirt! Phoenix deserves better than that and that's why your neighbors support Sal DiCiccio. You will receive your ballot in the mail this week. Please join your neighbors and send your ballot in early for Sal DiCiccio.
(This message paid for by DiCiccio for City Council.)
Wow! BIG Las Vegas political money! That sounds pretty scary. Was Dana Kennedy (Sal's opponent in a runoff election for Phoenix City Council) laundering money for the mob?
I took a look at the campaign finance reports at the City of Phoenix website and found that Dana Kennedy had received exactly zero campaign contributions from Las Vegas. That's zero as in zilch, nada, zippo, nothing! (You can verify this at the above link: just type Dana Marie Kennedy in the keywords, set the end of the date range to the current month, then click on the search button. To find Sal's campaign finance records, enter DiCiccio and do the same.)
So what gives? Sal's robocall said Dana was taking BIG money from Las Vegas political interests, and that just doesn't seem to be true. Could he possibly be lying with the aim of smearing Dana, while accusing her of conducting a smear campaign?!!
And this, dear friends, is a classic Rovian stratagem: Accuse your opponent of doing what you are doing. And that means, yes, it is actually Sal who is taking money from Las Vegas contributors, as you can verify for yourself. In fact, DiCiccio has taken double the amount of out-of-state money that Kennedy has, even while his minions accuse out-of-state interests of meddling in Arizona politics by contributing to the Kennedy campaign.
Yes, there was a PAC set up by two members of Emerge America (a non-profit group that trains Democratic women to run for political office) from Las Vegas, with the idea of raising money for the Kennedy campaign, but they wound up not contributing a cent, and, in fact, will probably be hit with fines for not filing the necessary paperwork for their PAC. These women sound like very scary people.
Did you know that one of Sal's contributors is a known associate of the wife of an alleged international arms dealer? He's also the person handling PR for the DiCiccio for City Council campaign. Jason Rose used to be part owner of a bar called "Nixon's" until it went belly-up.
This smear campaign against Dana Kennedy smells like Jason's handiwork, and I don't mean it smells like a rose. |
