Like a snake eating its own tail, in the 2010 election, the CCA ousted its own incumbents. They are the bums we voted out.
Part 2 of Actions speak louder than platforms
By Linda Felaco
As part of his recent series titled “Do political parties
matter?” my colleague Will Collette wrote about what he called “the
drone of the anti-incumbents,” i.e., “Vote the bums out.” It seems to be a
form a collective amnesia whereby during every election, voters toss out incumbents
who in the previous election were the saviors who were supposed to rescue us
from the previous incumbents.
Nowhere is this collective amnesia more bizarre than in the
Charlestown Citizens Alliance, which in the 2010 election actually ran against its own incumbents.
Readers of my previous story, “Actions speak louder than platforms,” know that it was only with great difficulty that I was able to obtain a copy of CCA’s 2010 campaign literature, which has been expunged from their website. I got a pdf scan of it from someone who had the original, but parts of the scan are illegible. On the advice of reader Davespop, I tried to retrieve the online version through the Wayback Machine but was unsuccessful. So each page had to be rescanned as an individual jpeg file. You can read them here, here, here, and here.
The CCA’s 2010 campaign literature is littered with disparaging references to the “incumbents” and “members of current government.” Reading it, you’d never know that every single member of the 2008-10 Town Council was handpicked by the CCA[1] and that they were essentially running against themselves.
The CCA’s 2010 campaign literature is littered with disparaging references to the “incumbents” and “members of current government.” Reading it, you’d never know that every single member of the 2008-10 Town Council was handpicked by the CCA[1] and that they were essentially running against themselves.
An entire page of the mailer is emblazoned in large type,
“Why Charlestown needs change.” Good question, seeing as how the CCA’s entire slate had been in office since 2008. Seems to me the CCA is the reason
Charlestown needs change.
I had yet to become involved in town politics at the time,
and I don’t mind admitting, I had a devil of a time trying to figure it out. It
reminded me of nothing so much as that famous scene in Chinatown where Jack Nicholson keeps slapping Faye Dunaway to get
her to tell him who Katherine is. “She’s my
sister!” “She’s my daughter!” “She’s my sister and my daughter!”
I do remember that it was fairly late in the day by the time
I made it to the polls in 2010, and the old CCA slate definitely seemed to be having a
bad time of it. Candi Dunn tried to hand me some literature, and when I
politely declined it (I do so hate to waste paper; I had all the mailings with
me, as I showed her), she got rather snippy with me. At the time, I remember
thinking to myself, “Hey don’t take it out on me.” But having seen the CCA in
action up close and personal since then, all I can say now is, Candi, if you’re
out there, I feel your pain.
And the funny thing is, some of the very same actions they
complained about the “incumbents” having done in the 2008-10 council session,
the CCA councilors immediately proceeded to engage in themselves once their new slate was in
office. To wit:
Replace “Ninigret Pond” with “Watchaug Pond,” plug in the
appropriate dollar figures and the acreage, and replace “U.S. Fish and Wildlife
and the Salt Ponds Coalition” with “John Donoghue,” and they might as well be
talking about Y-gate.
The CCA 2010 candidates also promised to subject all town
decisions to cost-benefit analysis. I don’t remember the current CCA council
members ever offering a cost-benefit analysis of the Y-camp purchase, do you?
Or of anything else, for that matter. What I do remember is Town Council
President Tom Gentz (CCA) having to be schooled by Stephen Hoff on financial
matters on several occasions. Go to Clerkbase and search for “Hoff” and you’ll
see what I mean.
Yes, the current CCA councilors are indeed the bums we voted
out.
[1] They
also assumed complete control of the Planning Commission in 2008, in part by hand-picking successors to elected members who’d resigned.