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PWCDC Tailspin Continues
By Greg L | 18 April 2007 | Prince William County | 3 Comments
Their website is broken. Many of their candidates haven’t filed timely campaign finance disclosures. Many incumbent Republicans appear to be running unopposed, or against candidates with little or no credibility. After the departure of Vic Bras and a significant portion of the PWCDC leadership, county Democrats still can’t pull it together, and time has pretty much expired for them to get their act together.
Due to a misconfiguration on the PWCDC website, the site is not displaying properly, all of the internal links on the site are broken, and it takes forever to load. Because the site uses a “basename” for links of “pwcdems.com” instead of “pwcdems.org”, a failure in the DNS configuration for “pwcdems.com” means that all internal links, including those that provide formatting for the site, are broken. Each time a visitor tries to load a page on that site, the site will only load after the request for whatever page is requested using the basename of “pwcdems.com” errors out, and that can mean a thirty second delay for most users. Even when the site is working, it doesn’t seem to have been updated since Vic Bras left. This is a pretty rookie mistake, but it’s only the beginning of a bunch of rookie mistakes for county Democrats.
Chris Brown, who is supposedly going to challenge cash-flush Delegate Jeff Frederick hasn’t filed a campaign finance disclosure on time. It’s bad enough to be saddled with the duty of running against the best-financed campaign in the county, but not even filing a report on time only makes his campaign appear more pathetic than anyone expected.
It doesn’t appear that any Democrats are actually going to run in the 51st House District, unless they decide to schedule some form of a convention, and even if they do they would be terribly behind in getting a campaign going. The buzz has been that Pandak was being told to run, and if she wouldn’t, Earnie Porta would have to do it. Word also was that Jeff Dion was being told to pass on this after getting hammered in last January’s special election for supervisor. Dion has gone to ground, Pandak has nonsensically decided to try a rematch for County Chairman, and Earnie Porta not only has an $18,000 negative balance in his campaign account from 2005, but the word is that there’s an even worse skeleton in his closet than the embarrassing sexual harassment lawsuit from when he worked at Georgetown University.
Democrats have nominated an absolute loser of a candidate to challenge Delegate Scott Lingamfelter, a mental health therapist from Warrenton who was campaign manager for Shawn O’Donnell’s 1st District run in 2005. In this conservative district, they’re running someone who incomprehensibly can run to the left of Bruce Roemmelt and Jeanette Rishell. That’s a really hard thing to do, since these two represent the “gay marriage” advocating, unitarian “social justice” wing of the county Democrats which isn’t even all that popular among the county democrats. Roemmelt is devoted to a largely fruitless and bizarre campaign of courting homosexual advocates, and while Rishell apparently can raise money to some degree, the reality of her hard-left convictions has even less chance of gaining traction now that the 50th District has a well-respected incumbent.
The county’s standard-bearer is again the hapless Sharon Pandak. Pandak was pretty badly beaten last November during the most favorable election cycle for Democrats in recent memory, and has a reputation for being a terrible campaigner and fundraiser. Now that all of her dire warnings about Corey Stewart’s handling of the county chairmanship have been proven wrong, there not only isn’t much she can run on, but her hyperbole during the 2006 campaign is ready ammunition for Corey Stewart to use against her. It’s pretty clear she’s running just so DPVA can have a warm body in the race, and it’s unlikely that the support she got last cycle will materialize during this one.
Prince William County pretty much doesn’t have a Democratic Party any more, and it’s showing up in the candidate selection process as well as in this early part of the 2007 campaign. There may be some surprises in store for us, but right now it’s beginning to look like the only elected Democrats in the county in November might be Neabsco Supervisor John Jenkins and Commonwealth Attorney Paul Ebert, if Bob Fitzsimmonds upsets Chuck Colgan.
Vic Bras wasn’t a perfect chairman for the PWCDC, but it’s certainly looking like he’s already sorely missed.
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3 Comments
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Greg, A new website will be up shortly its been down since Vic Bras left. There will be a convention in the 51st. Candidates only had to file the reports if they spend money or raised before April 1.
Does this mean that Jeff Dion would have trouble running a credible campaign?
I think anyone is capable of running a credible campaign against Gill.