Guest Opinion | Let the (Dirty) Games Begin!

It’s three weeks from election day and ballots are already out.

By Melissa Michelson

As we get closer, candidates start to feel the pressure. More and more lawn signs start popping up, candidates flush with cash push out a few more glossy mailers, and the negative campaign tactics begin.

Take for example a usually benign race for Pasadena City College Board of Trustee. In District 5, which for the most part encompasses South Pasadena, San Marino, and parts of Temple City, the race between incumbent Linda Wah and challenger Kristine Kwong is heating up.

In order to oust a long-time incumbent, there needs to be reason to do so. In this case, Kwong cites Wah’s lack of sound leadership on the Board of Trustees. Posted front and center on Kwong’s website: “We cannot allow apathy, dysfunction, or mismanagement to keep students from succeeding. That’s why Kristine Kwong is running for the PCC Board of Trustees.”

Accordingly, her campaign materials convey the same consistent message: the incumbent needs to go.

One mailer lists a series of facts:

• PCC was placed on academic probation from accreditation
• A judge voided the college board’s severance package to the former PCC president, referring to Mark Rocha whom the Board themselves had hired and who was one of PCC’s worst presidents
• PCC has had six presidents come and go in the past ten years
• There’s been a recent vote of no confidence in the current leadership (See here and here).

Another of Kwong’s flyers highlights Wah’s exorbitant travel expenses of $52k since 2015 and PCC’s dropping student enrollment.

It is within the public’s right to know about their elected representative’s record, especially when such a record is not regularly reported or when typical voters don’t know where to get trustworthy information.

Mud Slinging

In response to Kwong’s materials, Linda Wah sent out an email to her supporters first making the unsubstantiated claim that she is “the unanimous choice” of community and student leaders, without saying which ones, then she played victim to Kwong’s review of her record, calling it a “smear”, when in fact, she is the one engaging in smear tactics.

“…despite being the unanimous choice of our community and student leaders, my opponent continues to smear my campaign. The race that Krsitine Kwong has launched against me is getting uglier by the day.  Lies. Misrespresentations. Untruths. This has to stop.” – Linda Wah

Then, rather than rebut any supposed ‘untruths’ in her record, Wah obfuscates her participatory role in the problems plaguing PCC, and in her email to her supporters tries to incite moral outrage from Kwong’s past lapses in her personal voting record in local elections.

These tactics aim to distract voters from the issues at the college and pit them against a candidate who wants to elevate board ethics – after all, in 2015, PCC was put on probation with the state-wide accrediting body that cited one reason as being the board of trustees (Wah et.al) weren’t following their own ethics policies.

It gets worse

If all of that isn’t bad enough, the email then directed her supporters on a mass fishing expedition to reel in any dirt they could provide to Wah about her opponent vis a vis an intake form on a new website paid for by Linda Wah’s campaign, taking over Kwong’s name as the domain.

As of the time of this publishing, the intake box is now gone but the page is still live. You can see the intake form before it was taken down in this screengrab.

It’s precisely smear tactics such as Linda Wah’s that make voters weary of politicians and apathetic to participating in the democratic process.

Let’s not mistake the track record for character attacks. Let’s stick to the issues, stop feigning moral outrage over petty insignificancies and leave the virtue signaling* at the door. It’s time to retire dirty politics.

*Virtue signaling: the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue.

Melissa Michelson is a resident of SGV. This is her opinion.

 

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