Sue Lovell's Same Ol Song & Dance

One more turn around the bend here in the local silly season known as Houston City politics ....

A while back, I noted how Sue Lovell had changed course in campaign tactics by attacking Jay Aiyer after claiming to be running "for the position ... not against Jay." Now it seems that not only is Sue going to keep up her poisonous politics of personal destruction, but she's also now teaming up with the lone Republican in the race, John Elford. This ought to be heartening to some on the far right who are well aware of Lovell's weakness of support from the last election.

It ought to be surprising that Sue, a DNC member, is willing to aid and abet a Republican. Unfortunately, we've seen this act before ... and there's a few facts that ought to be put on the record to remind people about what now appears to be Sue Lovell's mode of operation.

Let's say, for instance, we have a race with two Dems and one Rep for a local race, Sue being one of the Dems. Sue makes unfounded charges about the other Dem based on campaign finance filings, turns out the charges were fictional, and then Sue goes on to help out the Rep in the race. Sound familiar? It should ... I basically just summed up Sue's 2003 campaign experience in a nutshell. Now she's at it again.

In 2003, Sue Lovell pored over the campaign finance reports of Ron Green (the other Dem in the race). Seems she found some line items involving payments for taxes. Off Sue went, claiming that Ron was using his campaign funds to pay his personal taxes. Unfortunately for Sue, there was nothing to that as the entry was properly noting that Ron Green was merely paying payroll taxes for campaign staff. After failing at this approach and missing the runoff, the DNC member then worked hand in hand with the Republican in the runoff, Bert Keller.

The tie that binds then, as now, is Alan Blakemore. Blakemore was a consultant for Keller and is now working with Elford. One would think that if any bedfellow might seem strange for a Democratic candidate in this race, it would be Alan Blakemore - who has been at the forefront of recent attempts to see a conservative makeover of City Hall. Will Sue once again fail to support her fellow Democrat in a runoff?

The latest dustup comes as The Forward Times, a small African American paper with a columnist (Ed Wendt) who is a) apparently friendly with the Lovell campaign, b) undergoing hospitalization, and c) has a Sue Lovell campaign PR staffer bragging about how many of his columns she's penned. Far be it from me to not wish the best for anyone dealing with life threatening illnesses (as I surely do), but do the norms of journalistic ethics still not apply? Ed defends himself in the latest column, but there's no rebuttal to the fact that the other party involved here has already admitted penning a few stories under Ed's byline. There's also no explanation for how Ed Wendt can write a detailed campaign story from the ICU ward, but cannot bring himself to phone the candidate he's slamming for a comment. Seriously, gang ... get your story straight.

Not content to merely run with one contracted hit peice, Ed Wendt follows (not yet online as I type) with what amounts to a repeat of the same column with one key difference - John Elford now joining Sue Lovell on the attack:

Another political consultant is backing up Lovell's story about the conflicting documents. Allen Blakemore, who is working with another candidate in the At-Large Two race, John Elford, tells Forward Times he also requested Aiyer?s file from the General Counsel's office shortly after it was received in January. He received the same file that was originally sent to Lovell's campaign with the "loan repayment" to Aiyer and the numerous credit card payments.

Blakemore said Aiyer's report had numerous problems. He calls the loan repayment "strange" since there is no corresponding loan shown on Aiyer's reports.

Blakemore also questions the fact that while Aiyer shows numerous donations, it does not detail any expenditures for a fundraiser.

"Being familiar with how campaigns operate, I know you don't get a lot of donations without a fundraiser," Blakemore said.

He also says reporting only payments to credit card companies is improper.

"When you make a campaign expenditure, you may charge it to American Express but you are really paying merchant XYZ," Blakemore said. "The Texas Ethics Commission has issued several public opinions that it is improper to hide campaign expenditures by showing payments only to credit card companies. You could put your entire campaign on credit card and not show what you spent your money on.

"Someone of Jay?s political experience would not have made a rookie mistake of showing payments to credit card companies if he weren?t trying to hide something," Blakemore told Forward Times.

Asked what Aiyer might be hiding, Blakemore refused to speculate.

That Alan Blakemore would attempt to make a mountain out of less than a molehill for a candidate as flawed as Elford might not surprise me. But that Sue continues to break her own campaign promise of running "for" the position is a crass act of opportunism that unfortunately now must be called a trend on her part. Democrats and independents alike have a tendency to see through frivilous charges like these. They certainly did last time. You'd think Team Lovell would have learned their lesson.

The choice is increasingly clear for progressives and independents (and even conservatives) in this race: one candidate, and all of one candidate is addressing issues that affect people's lives. We'll have some more on this over time, of course.

Full Disclosure that you won't get from The Forward Times: The author of this article is an avowed supporter of Jay Aiyer who offers that up front. He's also gotten a small paycheck for some web work on behalf of Team Aiyer even though there's no contractual basis, nor much of an expectation for such. I can assure you that the rate is well below minimum wage if I dared count the number of hours spent on behalf of the campaign.

But as one who has not had one bad thing to offer about Sue Lovell or any of the other actors in this drama prior to this experience, I think the facts stand for themselves regardless of my own preference.