My View II: In Retrospect Attack Mailer Buried Sue Greenwald

It was the iconic moment of the 2012 City Council Elections, an attack mailer coming from three Sacramento-based unions: the Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 447, IBEW Local 340, Operating Engineers Local Union 3 purportedly in Support of Stephen Souza and in Opposition to Sue Greenwald and  mailed to voters in an effort to remind them of an incident on the dais from 2010 when Sue Greenwald clashed with former Mayor Ruth Asmundson.

At the time, it was deemed to have backfired.  There was public outrage against the movement.  The group had seemed to have budgeted more pieces but did not send them out.  And for a time, Sue Greenwald seemed to benefit from the move.

In hindsight, the move may have ultimately doomed Sue Greenwald.  While it initiated public sympathy at first for the three-term councilmember, ultimately it seemed to remind voters of their trepidation with Ms. Greenwald’s personality.  That point was probably cemented during the sign-stealing fiasco at the end of the campaign.

What is less clear is whether Stephen Souza was also a target.  However, it did in Mr. Souza as well.  Councilmember Souza deplored the tactic and clearly believed this would backfire on him.  He told the Vanguard that the mailer could not have hurt him more if it were intended to do so.

In an email to Sue Greenwald posted on the Vanguard he wrote, “I was just made aware of this mailer/article on the Vanguard. I am sick over this. I truly enjoyed spending some time with you and Mike last night and commiserating over the nonsense that we must endure through these elections at times.”

“It is horribly ironic that such an awful mean thing like this would come out today, after such a pleasant evening last night,” he continued.  “You do not deserve to be treated this way, nor to have a hard moment in time singled out to attack you. This is terribly wrong.”

“I had absolutely nothing to do with this, nor did I authorize the use of my name by this PAC, nor have I been in communications with them. This mailer was done entirely without my knowledge,” he said.

In the end, Mr. Souza finished last.  “I’ll sit down and look at these things, but what I’ve learned from my time on the City Council is that sometimes you make people happy and sometimes you make people unhappy with your decisions,” Mr. Souza said at the time. “I probably did things that made people unhappy more than made people happy.”

Will Arnold had a front row seat as Dan Wolk’s campaign manager.

“Obviously the thing that people are pointing toward as the watershed moment in the election would be the attack mailer that went against Sue,” he said.  “So it’s natural to draw the conclusion that [the attack mailer] had an effect, and if you infer that the intended effect was to hurt Sue obviously and then also potentially to hurt Stephen by putting his name on it, and then if you look at the results, those two ended up on the wrong end of the election – then I think it would pretty much be the only conclusion that naturally jumps out at you that the mailer potentially had its intended effect.”

However, Mr. Arnold argued that this was a bit of specious reasoning.  He argued it was like the proverbial rock that keeps the tigers away.  Just because you see the rock and there are no tigers, does not prove any sort of causal relationship.

Instead, he sees a more simple explanation – citing the years of service both Sue Greenwald and Stephen Souza have given, while along the way people have come aboard and fallen off from their support.

“I would venture to guess that has more to do with the election result then just one mailer,” he said, “but the mailer is what jumps out at folks and that’s going to be the big question mark – how much of an effect did that have on the ultimate result.”

Still, there are important lessons to learn.

One is that the unions won here.  One of their goals may have been to remove Sue Greenwald as a barrier to the surface water project.  It is worth noting that, among the bigger donors to the Yes on Measure I campaign, were four building and trade unions, most notably IBEW Local 340 and Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 447 – two of the unions that funded a mailer in the 2010 campaign.

Again, if their goal was to clear Sue Greenwald to get the surface water project approved, it worked.

But at the same time this is a risky strategy.  For a good deal of the time in the campaign, it looked like the move may have backfired – and had sign-gate not emerged, it may well have.

During the same campaign, another attack mailer, this one by Deputy District Attorney Clinton Parish, who ran against Judge Dan Maguire for his Superior Court Judgeship, backfired.

The ramifications were swift when it turned out that Mr. Parish had failed to do due diligence in fact-checking his attacks.  This led to him losing key supporters, and getting blasted by the Sacramento Bee.  He would have to fire his campaign advisors and ultimately suspend his campaign.

Not only that, but he would lose his job in Yolo County and had to take a deputy district attorney position in Tuolumne County.

But it was worse than that, as he was accused by the California Bar of making misrepresentations about himself and his opponent in May 2012 during the election for Yolo County Superior Court.  Ultimately, the Bar ruled that, while he was “culpable of making a false assertion in a campaign mailer, with reckless disregard for the truth,” it stopped short of formal reprimand or even disbarment and recommended admonishment, which “is not considered discipline.”

Mr. Parish made two critical mistakes, one being he attacked a sitting judge, which is generally seen as a breach of protocol.  But, more importantly, he was wrong.

Unfortunately, attacks work when they are accurate with the facts.  Ms. Greenwald learned the lesson the hard way, and the question going forward is, given the level of disagreement with unions like the firefighters’ local, will we see more such attacks in 2014’s council elections?

That is a critical question as we move forward.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

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