I’m getting confused on the recent editorial in the Anderson Independent Mail’s editorial. The author insists that the issue raised by Councilman Bob Waldrep about a recent democrat vote by his opponent is not important.If you have been following the run-off campaigns of Bob Waldrep and challenger Raymond MacKay, you probably know about a post card that was mailed by Bob. The post card exposes the fact that Raymond voted in this year’s Democrat Presidential Primary and criticizes Raymond for filing for office in a Republican Primary a few weeks later.
I see this as a legitimate public record certainly allowable in a political race. I don’t live in this district, yet I know several voters in County Council District 1. Some are voting for Mr. Mackay, citing this recent vote makes no difference, and some are voting for Mr. Waldrep. Whether this issue is important is in the eyes of the voter. A voter can look at the issues brought up by candidates and judge for themselves. I don’t appreciate anyone telling voters to look at these issues, but for goodness sakes you are forbidden to look at those.
The interesting observation I see in the editorial is that the Anderson Independent sees this as a non issue and voters should disregard this as “meaningless”. If this issue is so meaningless, why has it been a news story in the Anderson Independent all week? Why has this one postcard dominated the news for the whole run-off ? I’m sure Bob’s campaign wished to bring up a single issue, then move on to others issues important to this county like transparency, wasteful spending, accountability to name a few. But many would rather beat this very dead horse (especially MacKay backers on the cocklebur blog here, here, & here) which by the way is their constitutional right of course. I’m certainly not criticizing Mr. MacKay’s supporters not letting go, just don’t quite understand it. They’re basically saying “This issue doesn’t matter, but we’re going to keep talking about it.”
