Mass Mailing Flops as Primary Campaign Ends

By Kenneth C. Rossignol
ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEXINGTON PARK — A last minute low-cost campaign rally by St. Mary’s Commissioner President Julie Randall (D. Spring Ridge) held on Sunday in Lexington Park was perhaps the biggest flop of the primary election campaign.

Randall’s rally, a picnic held at Lancaster Park, was advertized by a flyer which was mailed to every Democrat in the county and resulted in about 80 people showing up for the election eve rally with most of those in attendance being politicians straining their eyes to find a voter.

A large white tent was erected to shelter the huge crowd which never showed while Randall’s mentor, Congressman Steny Hoyer (D. Md. 5th) was on hand to give his stamp of approval to the incumbent Democrats attempting to win another term in office.

Randall is opposed by former St. Mary’s Finance Officer Charles "Pappy" Wade, who was forced out of his post by the former Board of Commissioners.

Wade is running a shoestring effort to win the Democratic Party nomination and any number of votes beyond the range of around 300 ought to be a major embarrassment for Randall and for Hoyer, who has been propping up the flagging campaigns of the incumbents.

Even former Sen. J. Frank Raley was in attendance at Sunday’s event as was School Board Member Mary Washington and former School Board President Jim Forrest.

The rally was held at the same time as the annual Salt & Pepper picnic which was held at the Elms Beach and could have drained away some of the liberal Democrats who may have attended Randall’s picnic.

A glossy two-color flyer was mailed to a reported 19,000 registered Democrats who either all had something better to do, will vote for Randall anyway but just don’t want to attend picnics, or perhaps, demonstrated to Randall that they are really ticked off at the record high taxes which were hiked by this current Board. Real estate, income taxes and settlement costs on homes and refinancing are now the highest in St. Mary’s County of any county in Maryland thanks to Randall’s Raisers.

Randall is a former elected school board member who beat conservative Democrat Wayne Suite for the party’s nomination in 1998 and went on to victory in that year’s general election over Republican incumbent Barbara Thompson.

Thompson is on the ballot again this year running against Democrat Roy Dyson who is seeking a third term in the Maryland State Senate after serving five terms in the United States House of Representatives.

Dyson was twice elected to the Maryland House of Delegates representing Charles and St. Mary’s Counties and then beat incumbent Republican Robert Bauman for the seat in Congress which at the time was the old 1st Congressional District covering all of Southern Maryland and all of the Eastern Shore along with about half of Harford County.

Thompson and St. Mary’s Commissioner Shelby Guazzo (R. Chaptico) represent the liberal wing of the Republican Party which, with over 16,000 registered voters calling themselves members of the GOP (Grand Old Party), finally have enough party members to have the same kind of blood baths the Democrats used to have.

But this year the battles are all on the Republican side as the Democrats have grown quiet and are doing their bloodletting behind closed doors.

The exceptions to that are the general consensus that Joe Anderson (D. Drayden) is extremely vulnerable after racking up a record as a county commissioner which would make Fidel Castro and Karl Marx green with envy.

Anderson has led the charge to raise taxes and take away property rights through downzoning off all rural land, both big and small parcels, without any compensation to the property owners, as well as supporting Draconian measures in the new land plan which former county commissioner Ford Dean called "communistic".

Anderson is opposed in the Democratic Primary by Drayden farmer Kenneth Boothe, who is quite possibly the smartest candidate on the ballot and by former Lexington Park businessman Merl Evans, son-in-law of the late Jimmy Finnacom. Evans has been letting Commissioners Dan Raley (D. Great Mills) and Tommy Mattingly (D. Leonardtown), two other record setting tax hikers who are part of the team of Randall’s Raisers, set the agenda for his campaign.

The last few weeks of the campaign have seen an intensely negative effort on the part of Guazzo who senses she is quickly losing ground to Republican Larry Jarboe. Guazzo has been trying to make hay out of Jarboe switching to the Republican Party in 1994 in time to run, successfully, for commissioner when he did the unbelievable and whipped incumbent Democrat Eddie Bailey in a race which veteran political observers of the conventional wisdom department said could never happen.

Jarboe, grandson of a Republican county commissioner who beat the grandfather of Bailey back in the 1940’s, was distracted by a disastrous fire of his sawmill in 1994 and was daily tending to his father at the nursing home where the elder Jarboe was a resident following a serious stroke. Between filling his duties as commissioner, feeding his father every evening and rebuilding the mill, Jarboe had no time left for campaigning and the Republican Party repaid him with a shocker of a loss to Guazzo, who came out with about 176 votes over the popular commissioner.

Democrats and Independents who support Jarboe had no way to vote for him and many of his Republican supporters stayed home thinking he had the election in the bag.

This year Jarboe has turned over every rock in the county in search of Republican voters and today’s election should show that his efforts were successful.

Guazzo’s ads have gone from negative to just plain silly when she attempted to lay claim to a conservative voting record, after taking part as part of the team of Randall’s Raisers.

In addition to voting for most every major tax hike she supported raising the impact fee for a building permit from $2,000 to $10,000 and participated in a secret deal with elitists who are neighbors of the Myrtle Point Park to scrap a master plan for a limited development of park facilities for people to fish and boat while she sponsored a secret deal to buy a large parcel of land in Chaptico from a developer and has voted to build a $6 million stable for horses while failing to fully fund the education budget.

Guazzo’s campaign ads became so ridiculous that former Commissioner Chris Brugman broke a long silence and let loose with a long letter to the editor in today’s paper blasting Guazzo’s negative and untrue campaigning against Jarboe and asking voters to send Jarboe back to work as a commissioner.

Should voters decide to do just that, unlike 1998, there is a Democrat on the ballot, but very few folks have ever heard of him or know his name. He is Marcel Brooks, an optometrist who works out of the county but lives in the north end of the county. In 1998 Democrats assumed Jarboe would roll over Guazzo and no one bothered to file. After Jarboe’s stunning defeat, Democrats then bickered over who would be picked by the Democratic Central Committee to carry the party banner.

This time, Randall and Anderson responded to the efforts by Mattingly and Raley to dump them by supporting Brooks. If Jarboe beats Guazzo, liberals will suddenly send cash and support to Brooks in an effort to keep out the maverick populist.

Mattingly and Raley both have significant Republican opposition in the general election. Raley is unopposed in the primary while Mattingly has a little known opponent, Clare Whitbeck, who’s chief campaign stunt has been to put out a flyer saying she will "listen" while failing to disclose to voters that she favors raising taxes even more than Mattingly has already done, or revealing that she favors Draconian downzoning of rural land, virtually robbing farmers of the value of their land and wiping out the value of small parcels which citizens have been holding as a nest egg for retirement.

Whitbeck’s views have been concealed since she became a candidate and she speaks in code words calling for preservation of rural areas without letting folks know how she plans to do it.

Raley is expected to be facing Vernon Gray, who should handily defeat Charles Newkirk, a former member of the Board of Zoning Appeals. Newkirk flirted with joining the conservative GOP slate headed up by Rocky Rowland but instead quit the conservatives after several private meetings and went with the liberal Republicans.

Raley should have been the most popular commissioner since the late Lexington Park businessman Larry Millison, who was elected to three terms, in 1974, 1978 and 1982. Millison hardly campaigned and only had a few signs out along roads, with just a scattering of bumper stickers, a far cry from today’s mega-bucks campaigns where some of the well-heeled candidates are shelling out as much as $50,000 for a campaign.

But Raley earned the reputation as being a double-talking fellow who could not be trusted to do anything that he promised he would do and was only as good as the last person he talked to, causing great disappointment to many folks who had hoped his small business owner’s orientation would provide some common sense on the Board.

An Army veteran and father of two, Raley is a likeable fellow who’s wife is the sister of former commissioner Dr. Pat Jarboe. Jarboe was a commissioner, much like Raley, which may account for some of the poor advise Raley has demonstrated having listened to instead of listening to the good sense of his mother, the popular Patsy Raley.

Instead of being unbeatable, Raley could easily go down to defeat should Gray wallop Newkirk in the GOP brawl today.

Newkirk is one of only two black candidates on the ballot and has built little support among blacks, which is ironic given the popularity of his parents who have been active in civic groups and the Democratic Party for decades. Not too many blacks are Republicans and Newkirk’s flirtation with and jilting of the conservative slate may prove to hurt him as he asks folks to consider him simply as a Republican and not as a black.

While attempting to convince folks to forget about his race, Newkirk’s side has started a whispering campaign aimed at Gray trying to depict him as a racist. Gray is not a racist and the issue blew up on Sunday when the Washington Post printed a recap of the election with a picture of C. Vernon Gray, a black man who is on the Howard County Council, instead of a photo of W. Vernon Gray, who is running against Newkirk.

The black photo of black Gray puts a silly end to a false charge which is likely enough to have caused Newkirk to turn green with envy at the extra attention Gray got over being black.