Liberals are panicked about Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan being a potential -- and potent -- conservative antidote in 2014 to Mark Begich's single term in the U.S. Senate and they are doing what liberals do -- identifying potential rival candidates early, targeting them and attempting to destroy them by any means possible.
Sullivan drew their ire when, as the new mayor last year, he kicked over one rock after another and found the city's financial picture was el stinko. Millions in deficits. Three-card monte fund manipulation. You name it. Begich's positive poll numbers sank to about 37 percent. Sullivan's -- after spending cuts and his refusing to tax to the max -- soared from 56 percent when elected to about 70 percent.
That puts a bull's-eye on Sullivan's back. How better to explain the ongoing smear? The only thing missing? Vic Vickers ranting in front of a TV camera as he did in the 2008 campaign when he helped Begich eek out a win over then-Sen. Ted Stevens.
A Vickers likely looms on the horizon as the left scrambles to find something, anything, to crater Sullivan's perplexing poll numbers. The race for Begich's seat, after all, realistically starts in 18 months or so, not much time in politics.
Sullivan, to his credit, has not made it easy. The Assembly, after he pointed out Begich's gaffes, commissioned municipal attorney Dennis Wheeler to conduct a study. Wheeler concluded Begich misled the Assembly before its majority approved $150 million in labor contracts in 2008.
The Assembly dutifully accepted the report, dismissed it as "politics," and seemingly lost interest. But public pressure built for action. Assembly members decided to fund a forensic audit. That, then, has become the left's biggest problem. What if the audit, heaven forbid, recommends law enforcement involvement? What then?
Uh-oh, says the left, we need something juicy to distract the news media and drive Sullivan's poll numbers into the mud. Luckily, it already had a nifty story in the works. Beginning late last year, liberal bloggers and wannabe journalists started trying to peddle a tale about Sullivan to the mainstream media that was so smarmy I'm not going to dignify it here. The legitimate media, to their credit, ignored the story.
His attackers decided to take another whack at Sullivan with a story about his being trustee for his late father's trust and not disclosing that to the city. It had short news legs. Sullivan got zip from the trust. Who cares? It was time, the left decided, to drop the smarm bomb.
The plan was to out the story publicly at last Tuesday's Assembly meeting. Hyped well ahead of time, and with the media and the left's jackals breathless in the audience, the task was left to a liberal activist who was to testify during a budget portion of the meeting. She may have sensed something amiss as she started to make a stink about the Sullivan administration's spending about $6,000 on sole-source contracts.
(Actually, it was $6,100 for two sole-source contracts, the only two in the first nine months of Sullivan's term. After Acting Mayor Matt Claman found the mess Begich had left, he was faced with a $17 million deficit. He cut the Office of Equal Opportunity staff by half, to two from four. It asked for help to put on the Mayor's Unity Dinner. A $4,500 sole-source contract was awarded for the dinner. The second, for $,1600, was to plan events for the Alaska Municipal League meeting -- Anchorage was the host city --- because staff in Sullivan's office also was cut.)
The woman Tuesday night may have considered prattling on, but she would have looked incredibly stupid after it was pointed out Begich spent about $1.6 million in sole-source contracts while in office. That was that.
But the smear lives, ensconced in anonymous -- aren't they always? -- leftist blogs and Web sites. Now the jackals can report on the existence of the report -- and look clean. It's an old dodge.
It will not get any better for Sullivan so long as he continues to point out Begich's failings. The attacks will continue; the left will try to hamstring his administration and demean him personally. Ask George Bush. The left is desperate. After all, Begich is its only modern success story in Alaska.
You can bet it will do anything to keep him in office. Anything.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.
PAUL JENKINS
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