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August 20, 2006

Siding with Goliath

Long-time conservative attorney Kelly Clark has filed an elections complaint asking the Oregon Secretary of State to kick Constitution Party Mary Starrett off the ballot. The reason: he cannot find any evidence that the Constitution Party filed the required legal notice of its June 3 nominating convention in a general circulation newspaper. That's his story, and he's sticking to it.

Clark swears it has nothing to do with anyone's fears that Starrett will be a spoiler and take votes away from the Republicans' lukewarm candidate, Ron Saxton. No, of course not. And it was not done in conjunction with the Saxton campaign. A few voters who just happened to support Saxton were so terribly concerned about the potential that the little ol' Constitution Party might be violating election law that they were compelled to fork over the dough to hire Mr. Clark to do something about it.

Starrett isn't buying it. She is accusing the Saxton campaign of "reenacting the Tanya Harding saga – with Starrett as Nancy Kerrigan – while Kelly Clark plays the goon!" And apparently she also, somewhere that I have been unable to locate, brought up the poor man's status as a sex offender. For which some are calling for Starrett to apologize for saying something that is "just plain mean."

For a long time now, Clark has been cultivating the image that he's helping little David's take on big bad Goliaths. Doing things that matter in the big picture of life. I've just got to ask, how can Clark reconcile that image with his current picking on Mary? Could it be that when this former gay-rights advocate decided to work to stop gay marriage he wasn't displaying "disgust with the misuse of power," as he claimed, but rather a willingness to take up a cause that came with a paycheck? Could that be why he's siding with Goliath now?

Posted by Becky at August 20, 2006 08:33 PM