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By Kenneth C. Rossignol
ST. MARY’S TODAY
GREAT MILLS — Long time political maverick and conservative Democrat Roy Dyson has announced he will once again stand for election in next year, an election in which many liberal Democrats could be run out of Dodge.
Dyson first ran for the Maryland State Senate in 1994, whipping local grocery store tycoon James Manning McKay, a Republican, in the district which encompasses all of St. Mary’s and the lower third of Calvert County. In 2002, after the 2000 census, the district was expanded to include a small area of Charles County.
Dyson was reelected by overwhelming margins in 1998 and 2002 and in 2006 he faced St. Mary’s Commissioner Tommy “Hambone” McKay, a Republican, who spent more than a half million dollars in an attempt to oust the veteran Democrat.
Dyson beat McKay, the son of his first senate opponent, by more than a 2-1 margin after it was revealed that McKay had lied about his college degree and then attempted to blame a county secretary for the inaccurate claim on his biography posted on the county website. In fact, McKay had made numerous earlier claims to a phantom degree in business administration.
McKay wasn’t helped by his son’s arrest and conviction on counterfeiting charges and the revelation that McKay had hidden some of the funny money his son had produced on a home computer in his county commissioner office in Leonardtown. McKay said at the time he was keeping the evidence “safe in the hands of the government”, instead of turning it over to police until he was asked by the cops.
Whatever impact the McKay foibles had on the race in 2006 may be hard to quantify, but the two blowups are often cited by many who were former supporters of McKay and others who explained their votes.
When asked by the Baynet just after the 2006 General Election what factors did he blame for his stunning defeat by Dyson, McKay blamed ST. MARY’S TODAY. McKay ought to know.
For the past three years McKay has been talking up a possible run for either commissioner president or another run against Dyson. A constant churn of stories of McKay running for delegate with Johnny Wood stepping aside and supporting the Republican McKay has several Democrats who would like the post but are afraid to challenge Wood in the Democratic Primary, twisting in the wind.
Wood’s gravy days in Annapolis ended in 2002 when his buddy Speaker Cas Taylor was tossed out by voters in Western Maryland and the new speaker canned Wood as a committee chairman. Wood’s seat, a target for a Republican pickup, is constantly being eyed by those ambitious for an Annapolis job and for politicians such as Commissioner Tommy Mattingly who is term-limited and has no future.
McKay cranked out a new newspaper filled with his family’s grocery store ads, appointed his counterfeiting son the publisher and spends much of his effort on hammering Roy Dyson in his free giveaway paper as he attempts to wreak revenge on the victor of his race, thinking that will be his route to electoral redemption.
It is unknown if McKay actually has tried to gain an authentic degree from the University of Maryland or simply instruct his son to fire up the printing press and spin out a Diploma for daddy.
Dyson’s campaign in 2006 achieved a new level of sophistication which he had practiced in six election cycles when he served in Congress. Five of those campaigns were successful and employed tactics such as mass mailings of glossy literature, polling of key groups and targeted demographics in the effort.
In 2006, Dyson returned to add this style of campaigning to his toolbox in addition to his dogged, daily and determined effort to visit and cajole voters from early in the morning until the last events of the day and do it seven days a week.
In addition to non-stop campaigning Dyson also tended to constituent matters, carrying a caseload of help for those in his district, and for many who are not but still turn to him for assistance.
One of the principal mass mailings that Dyson employed in the 2006 campaign effort was a large foldout flyer which showed McKay holding large sums of cash signifying the campaign donations of developers at the same time that McKay was cooking up a backroom deal with a Baltimore developer for public lands on Indian Bridge Road.
The General Assembly was enraged to discover that a deal was in the works to sell off land at the same price the state had paid for it, and this deal was at the time that land prices had skyrocketed. The developer had been a campaign contributor to Gov. Ehrlich and the deal being orchestrated by McKay didn’t add to the luster of his halo already damaged by his lying about a college degree and his counterfeiting kid.
Since the 2006 election, McKay has been named as a respondent in divorce proceedings in Calvert County Circuit Court and later married the woman in the divorce proceeding. In the process, McKay dumped the woman he had been living with for several years, further engaging himself as the subject of the cocktail party conversation of the country club Republicans he values so much.
McKay’s value as a future candidate is measured the strongest when he is matched up against Democrat St. Mary’s Commissioner Jackie Russell. Russell has proved to be simply a rube and about as coherent as Commissioner Kenny Dement (R. Piney Point). Those who pit McKay and Russell in a matchup say that hands down they will go with McKay. That’s a lot like choosing between poison ivy and chiggers.
Fortunately, with the entry of Commissioner Larry Jarboe’s slate of Town Hall Alliance candidates, voters will be able to choose Randy Guy instead of picking between dweedle dee and dweedle dumb.
McKay had begun to build a good record as a commissioner in the first budget cycle of his term as commissioner but he quickly became star struck by Annapolis.
When McKay won the commissioner post in 2002 by beating Democrat Julie Randall, the majority board which served between 1998 and 2002 had raised taxes each year and had built a firm reputation of out of touch elitism. Commissioner Joe Anderson was beat by Kenny Dement who frankly told folks he might be dumb but not dumb enough to raise their taxes. Unfortunately for the taxpayers, Dement did get dumb enough to raise taxes and now he is on his way out to pasture after raising taxes repeatedly in the present term.
In his first term, McKay, who quickly established a reputation as a “country club Republican”, led a group of campaign supporters to Annapolis during the session and visited Senator Dyson’s office where the McKay group went around and actually planned where they would rearrange the furniture. Clearly that was a plan that didn’t have the right follow through.
Reports from those involved with the McKay campaign for State Senate are that when the revelation of McKay’s fake college degree was exposed that even his own committee simply wilted under the embarrassment and the wind was gone from their sails, never to return.
Guy, a member of the Board of Appeals, past American Legion commander, retired Air Force veteran and small business owner, has good conservative values and is not tainted by the scandals surrounding McKay.
Guy, who had been elected to the Democratic Central Committee, is among a large pool of voters who are switching to the Republican Party as the Democratic Party becomes more and more leftist and dominated by extreme liberals.
Dyson, who was first elected to the House of Delegates in 1974 at the age of 24, was 30 years old when he won a seat in the U. S. Congress in 1980. Dyson was reelected to the House of Representatives four times and in 1990 lost to Republican Wayne Gilchrest. Gilchrest held the seat, minus Southern Maryland, until he lost his primary election in 2008.
Dyson, who always did well in Southern Maryland when the area was part of his congressional district, decided to reenter public service and in the 1994 Democratic primary amassed a larger vote than all three of his well-known opponents in the primary.
Well funded campaigns were mounted by John William Quade, David Densford and three-term Sheriff Wayne Pettit.
They were skunked, smoked and gift-wrapped by Dyson.
In the 1994 General Election, former delegate and commissioner James Manning McKay unloaded his family bank account and armed with $50,000 of his own funds tried to defeat Dyson.
The difference between his effort that year and the 2006 effort by his son Tommy was about $450,000 and the result was an even more devastating defeat for the McKay dynasty.
The following are the election results for State Senate in District 29 in which Dyson has dominated each election.
In 1998 Dyson was opposed by a Lusby teacher who failed to gain any momentum and in 2002, Dyson was opposed by former St. Mary’s Commissioner Barbara “Babs” Thompson, a liberal Republican, who had been tossed out of office in 1998.
Thus, McKay, who’s ego would never let him have to run for the post of commissioner from Hollywood / Leonardtown, has to either run for the post of commissioner president and take on the Jarboe slate candidate or run again to try to defeat Dyson.
Neither option looks promising for the wealthy but perhaps toxic McKay. He just may be electorally challenged and could have trouble winning a three-legged sack race.
The following are vote totals for each of the Dyson senate campaigns.
1994
Roy Dyson (Democratic)
James Manning McKay (Republican)
Calvert
Dyson: 4,884
McKay: 5,075
St. Mary’s
Dyson: 11,776
McKay: 7,603
Total
Dyson: 16,660
McKay: 12,678
Percent (Rounded)
Dyson: 57%
McKay: 43%
1998
Roy Dyson (Democratic)
Culver Sprogle Ladd (Republican)
Calvert
Dyson: 7,627
Ladd: 5,006
St. Mary‘s
Dyson: 17,144
Ladd: 4,380
Total
Dyson: 24,771
Ladd: 9,386
Percent (Rounded)
73% Dyson
27% Ladd
2002
Roy Dyson (D.)
(Won)
Barbara R. Thompson (R.)
Other Write-Ins
Calvert
Dyson: 4,691
Thompson: 4,208
Other: 2
Charles
Dyson: 389
Thompson: 441
Other: 4
St. Mary’s
Dyson: 15,452
Thompson: 10,065
Other: 14
Totals
Dyson: 20,532
Thompson: 14,714
Other: 20
Percentage
58.22% Dyson
41.72% Thompson
0.06%
2006
Thomas F. McKay
Roy Dyson (Won)
Other Write-Ins
Calvert
McKay: 4,527
Dyson: 5,607
Other: 11
Charles
McKay: 421
Dyson: 564
Other: 3
St. Mary’s
McKay: 9,240
Dyson: 19,087
Other: 48
Totals
McKay: 14,188 (35.9%)
Dyson: 25,258 (63.9%)
Other: 62 (0.2%
McKay 2006 Campaign Report
of Outstanding Obligations
Outstanding
Loan Balance
$33,659.44
Outstanding Bills Due
$9,824.18
Total Outstanding Obligations
$43,483.62
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