Before the elections this past Tuesday I did some trolling on various online forums to see if I could find what people were saying about the campaigns. The thing I heard the most was that Stehly was going to lose because she is negative and Brown was positive. It proved to be true.
These days I have found people prefer to be lied to as long as what they here is positive. The ugly truth does not interest them.
I had the opportunity to be close enough to Stehly’s campaign to review her mailings and website and I asked her several questions about how she came up with some of the information.
Guess what, Theresa never lied about anything. Her campaign newsprint mailer, paid for by her campaign and an obvious promotional piece was dubbed as a fake newspaper not only by people online in forums but by the Gargoyle Leader (I guess they were miffed because the mailer used a mock logo of the USA TODAY which is owned by media-monopoly-corporate-giant GANNET which also owns our down home friendly daily paper). If you read the paper carefully and check on www.siouxfalls.org you will see that Brown’s voting record was as Stehly said it was, and you will also find a PDF of the document where Brown and other councilors donated money to the indoor pool campaign. Yup, the truth. How tragic and negative indeed.
Sure there was an endorsement in the mailer written by Stehly’s friends, but wouldn’t we expect that? After all, she paid for it. Brown‘s mailings were full of vague information that you could interpret several ways, something they call in politics wiggle room. For instance he claims he is saving the city money by buying the Zoo. Huh? Don’t we subsidize the place now because we decided to buy it? Wouldn’t that mean we are losing money on the facility every year? Isn’t that untruthful?
Honestly I don‘t have a personal problem with Vernon Brown. Never had. I actually went to High School with his wife Tammi, who is very wonderful brilliant person. I have to agree with Kermit Staggers on the matter, he just felt Stehly was the better candidate and so did I, because she was truthful and didn’t sugarcoat what is going on in this city. A day before the election, Stehly said to me “Scott, I have always been truthful in this campaign and that is what is important.†Stehly is right. But apparently 60% of the voters in Tuesday’s election prefer to be lied to. Apathy is NOT a beautiful thing.