Chesser Favorite to Whip Fritz in '06

Richard Fritz, who couldn't even draw 10 percent of registered Republican voters out to vote for him on Tuesday as he attempted to unseat Judge Karen Abrams
ST. MARY'S TODAY photo

By Kenneth C. Rossignol
ST. MARY'S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN --- Former Deputy States Attorney Christy Chesser, local attorney Bryan Dugan, who made a strong showing in the Tuesday judicial race, Leonardtown lawyers, John Mattingly, Shane Mattingly and Sam Baldwin, even young attorney Dan Slade, now are all being talked about in political circles as potentially lethal candidates against the tainted Richard Fritz, who huffed and puffed and couldn't even make a dent in the race for judge. 
Fritz, whose backers had all but crowned him as King of the Hill, apparently liked him better as a States Attorney where he can do them plenty of waivers and favors, dropping charges, stetting charges and making lenient plea agreements. 
Even former States Attorney George Sparling, a veteran criminal defense attorney who is still popular and said to be the best attorney in St. Mary's County, is being talked about as a possible strong candidate to replace Fritz.
The dynamics are there, an injured and bleeding prosecutor who has made more deals for defendants than he ever put behind bars, found his tough law and order campaign fall on deaf ears of voters who were more concerned with his past than with giving him a political future as a judge.
Whether Fritz has any future at all in politics remains to be seen.
But longtime political observers saw danger lurking for Fritz in a "quiet" election. 
Voters were seething over his arrogance in wanting to unseat the county's first female judge, a judge that Fritz attacked boldly and just barely treated her with any more respect or dignity than he did his victim of a gang sexual conquest he plead guilty to as a young man.
When his victim came out on national television several years ago and said that she was held down, raped, all the while screaming, Fritz said that the act was consensual and that the woman asked for it. He told ABC chief correspondent Chris Wallace, now with Fox News, that 15-year-old girls take on three young men often, he said, "it happens all the time".
It didn't happen for Fritz on Tuesday.
Voting was consensual and the act of going to the polls for more than 5100 Republicans left Fritz with a scant 18 percent of the GOP vote.  More than 17,000 Republicans were registered to vote and less than ten percent of the GOP found Fritz worth their vote.
Maybe it had something to do with the way he trashed Carla Bailey for speaking out and saying she had been gang-raped.  Maybe it had something to do with the way that the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals worded the ruling of the court in the case brought by this newspaper in which the court said that Fritz and his klan of deputies who seized all available copies of this paper on election eve 1998 violated the first amendment, acted under the color of authority and were in violation of Maryland's newspaper theft act.
Maybe the spectacular loss of Fritz in the Judge's race was just an affirmation of the good job he had been doing as States Attorney, a silly idea advanced on election night by Commissioners Larry Jarboe and Tommy McKay, who clearly had too much air time to fill and not enough time to think.
Conventional wisdom in St. Mary's County is a difficult thing to track.
In 1998 and 2002, Fritz faced weak Democratic Party candidates who did not enjoy the support of their party. In addition, the Republicans proved that they were little more than whoremongers, who had been out in the cold for so long without any elected officials in their party that they would support the devil himself if he ran, and he did. And they did. Twice. But not on Tuesday, March 2, 2004. Fritz's Grand Old Party was over.
The Republicans showed that like all sinners, they could seek redemption for their mistakes and while the Democratic Party came together, with all factions around the county on board Abram's campaign train --- conservatives joining with liberals --- the GOP also found their moral compass and put Fritz in their dust, making him past history.
Dugan can see the handwriting on the wall and will recognize that Christy Chesser can take up where Abrams left off and unite the Democratic Party behind her as she prepares for 2006.  Dugan would be smart to simply change to Republican where he would find freshly redeemed sinners who gave him more votes than they gave to Fritz ready to embrace him as their candidate.