David Smith: NOW He Tells Us (Fulton County Obfuscation Edition)
On Tuesday, March 28, Fulton County’s GOP Central Committee shocked the state when it rejected incumbent US Senator Mike DeWine on the first ballot.
On the second ballot, neither of the two remaining candidates, David Smith and Bill Pierce, could muster the two-thirds majority necessary to win endorsement. Both were thus evaluated as “qualified.”
The format, as told to me by several of those who attended, was a brief speech by each candidate (or his representative, in the case of DeWine), followed by the balloting. No time was allowed for committee members to ask questions of the candidates.
How serendipitous for David “NOW he tells us” Smith.
With the permission of new S.O.B. Alliance member Black Swamp Conservative, who is a member of the Fulton County GOP Central Committee, I made confidential phone calls to committee members yesterday. I was able to speak to nine of them, and may receive return phone calls from a couple more who I expect will not change the thrust of this post. I chose not to leave answering machine messages, but did leave messages for return calls when actual humans answered the phone.
I did not pressure anyone to answer my questions. I wanted to get their sense of three things:
- Whether they personally knew David Smith’s full resume at the time they cast their endorsement ballots, including his three runs for Congress in three different states and the results he achieved in each of them. You may recall that his “Fact Sheet” was most likely not posted on his web site until the early AM hours of March 29, and that until then all we had was a very vague bio.
- Whether they believed that a significant number of other committee members knew Smith’s full resume.
- If the answer to the second question was “no,” whether full knowledge of Mr. Smith’s resume might have affected the votes of the committee.
I deliberately did not ask if the lack of full resume disclosure would have affected their own vote, because I felt it would violate the confidentiality of the voting process that had just occurred.
The results were these:
- Some of those I spoke with did not know Smith’s full resume, ranging from only not knowing about his 2002 Utah attempt to gain a congressional nomination at that state’s GOP nominating convention to not knowing about his limited time residing in Ohio and/or not being aware of any of his previous three runs and/or the results of them.
- The vast majority of those I spoke with agreed that knowledge of Smith’s full resume had the potential to affect the results of the balloting, ranging from “could have” to “would have” and points in between.
The significance of this is that we don’t know whether David Smith would have earned the “Qualified” rating he received if he had fully disclosed the length of time he has lived in teh state, his past political runs, and their results. His “Qualified” rating is thus at least tainted, and at most undeserved.
Bill Pierce, by contrast, has no such taint, and instead may have been denied an endorsement by David Smith’s basic lack of honor — yet another reason why he should, for his own good and the integrity of the electoral process, withdraw from Ohio’s US Senate race.
