LEONARDTOWN --- Republican candidates Noel Temple "Tim" Wood and Ken Carkhuff, both retired U.S. Navy officers, appearing at the Veteran's Day parade in Leonardtown, behaved like nice gentlemen and sporting spirits, taking their recent defeat at the polls in stride.
The two were seen mingling with the public on Veterans Day as happy as larks. Wood had contested for a delegate's seat and Carkhuff for a commissioner's seat.
"Politics is like sports. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose," Commissioner Dan Raley (D. Leonardtown) told ST. MARY'S TODAY.
However, Commissioner President Tommy McKay appeared to be just too bitter over being thumped in the elections on Tuesday against Senator Roy Dyson. "Some people are not good losers," said Raley's wife Ann, sitting next to Raley at Leonardtowntown Square.
"Get out, get out of my face. You a---hole," McKay told this correspondent earlier in the morning as he tried to console with him over his defeat in the Senate elections. Looking dejected, McKay was sitting alone drinking coffee on a chair on the sidewalk outside the County Seat Restaurant on the town square in Leonardtown , across from the famous Linda's Cafe.
His bitterness could be felt even during his speech at Leonardtown Veterans Day event when he talked about his four years of work as county commissioner president. Still, he said the voters had "decided to throw the bums out."
McKay lost by more than 2-1 to Senator Roy Dyson in the Tuesday election for the Maryland Senate seat shared by Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s.
Dyson had built a solid reputation in environmental stewardship; advocating commuter rail and a second span over the Patuxent and espousing the cause of the middle class and blue-collared people.
In contrast, McKay defended the Hackerman Deal that would have given away 832 acres of protected land at Salem tracts to Baltimore developer Willard Hackerman for peanuts.
McKay also committed more than one major personal blunder that voters didn't seem to like.
McKay told police that he had hidden in his county government office a bogus $20 that his son and a friend had printed on his son's computer at his son’s home, instead of immediately handing it over to the law.
McKay later said he kept the bogus money “safe in in the hands of the government”.
McKay also shot himself in the foot as for several years his official biography on the county’s web site and later his campaign material falsely claimed he had a business degree and graduated from Maryland.
After the fraud was exposed in ST. MARY’S TODAY Online Edition, which reported that he had not graduated, he falsely told a Washington Post reporter that he was an external student of the University of Maryland, but when challenged by the reporter, he told her he had "panicked" and "misspoke."
The fake degree claim by McKay put the icing on his Election Day cake and his half million dollar effort funded by builders and developers from across Maryland to defeat Dyson went down in flames.
McKay’s father, former delegate and commissioner president James Manning McKay spent $50,000 on a unsuccessful 1994 effort to defeat Dyson. The week before this year’s election, the elder McKay started up a new newspaper.
Senator Roy Dyson confirmed to ST. MARY'S TODAY that McKay called him to concede defeat. "Rather snidely," Dyson said.
McKay's behavior was atypical of his good family background as both his octogenarian parents and other family members have been kind and gracious with all in the community, regardless of political affiliations.
An 88-year-old James Manning McKay was present the entire evening on September 28 during the last rites of Senator Dyson's mother, Marie Dyson. "He kept standing there for four hours," local businessman Bubbly Knott confirmed.
Meanwhile, Tommy McKay went up and down the line of people waiting to enter Holy Face Church to view the body of the Great Mills matriarch, shaking hands and campaigning.
In spite of realizing his political blunders of lying for years about obtaining a college degree, keeping counterfeit money in his office, and trying to cook up a back room deal to give away 832 acres of public land to Willard Hackerman were in the main reasons that led to his defeat, McKay put the blame on ST. MARY'S TODAY in a recent interview.
McKay got 9240 against Dyson's 19087, which translates into losing by 1007 votes over and above a two-to-one defeat. Even Joe Bush, who ran for county commissioner president, did much better than McKay as he got 9425 votes against Jack Russell's 18541 votes. Bush got almost 200 votes more than that of McKay's.
Interestingly, Commissioner Larry Jarboe (R. Golden Beach), told ST.MARY'S TODAY said it may take quite a while for McKay to recover from the ignominy of the massive defeat. In spite of being a member of the Republican Party, Jarboe opposed McKay on many local issues. Jarboe said, "He lost by a huge margin. He will now have to start from scratch, perhaps by contesting the seat that would be vacated by Tom Mattingly four years from now," Jarboe said. "Before that he will have to go to college to get his business administration degree, show it to the voters and ask them to forgive him, Jarboe thought.
"But I doubt he will do that," said Jarboe.
