I'm honestly not sure which of these two bozo's will win, but Mannix is one SOB. I hope they beat the hell out of each other.
Oregon GOP race abruptly turns ugly
By: Josh Kraushaar
May 19, 2008 05:13 PM EST
In March, Oregon’s Republican Party chairman, Vance Day, got both GOP candidates running to succeed Rep. Darlene Hooley (D-Ore.) to pledge to run campaigns devoid of any personal attacks. A month later, in gratitude for the relatively civil campaign, he sent a letter to Mike Erickson and Kevin Mannix thanking them for the positive tone.
That now seems like ancient history.
Thanks to a campaign that has suddenly turned poisonous, the Republican primary in Oregon’s 5th District has turned into a nasty referendum on one candidate’s past personal behavior — a development that may cause the GOP to fritter away one of its few opportunities to pick up a Democrat-held House seat.
Mannix, a former gubernatorial nominee, unleashed a bombshell when he mailed a letter to 60,000 Republican voters last week accusing his well-funded rival, businessman Erickson, of impregnating an ex-girlfriend in 2000 and then paying for her abortion.
As evidence, Mannix cited an e-mail from a friend of the ex-girlfriend, which claims that Erickson used cocaine at parties, had sex with her friend and later drove his ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and gave her money to pay for an abortion. The e-mails first surfaced in Erickson’s 2006 campaign against Hooley, but Hooley and the media didn’t bring it up during the race.
Erickson acknowledged having a “casual relationship” with the woman in a statement released by his campaign but denied the specific charges. Last Thursday, he told the Portland Oregonian that he was unaware his ex-girlfriend was pregnant, though he acknowledged giving her $300 and dropping her off at a doctor’s office for an appointment.
“These unsubstantiated and untrue allegations are from an e-mail from 2006 that no news media reported at the time. They are just as untrue today as they were then,” he said in a statement.
The seat, currently held by six-term representative Hooley, is a competitive district that stretches from the southern Portland suburbs south to Salem and ranges from rural timber country to Pacific Ocean coastline. It is one of only two Democrat-held open seats that Republicans are planning to contest in November.
The charges have seriously damaged Erickson, who was once seen as one of the top Republican recruits this election cycle. While national Republicans aren’t taking sides in the primary, they were impressed with Erickson’s 2006 campaign against Hooley and his ability to self-finance.
Erickson, who held Hooley to 54 percent of the vote in 2006, held a narrow 4-point lead in one mid-April poll conducted by SurveyUSA and was vastly outspending Mannix on the air as well.
But the Mannix campaign’s internal tracking poll now shows that the controversy has eroded Erickson’s advantage and put Mannix in the lead. The furor has had an acute effect on Republican women, with Mannix gaining 15 points in that demographic since the scandal broke.
“You cannot deny this gives people pause,” said Mannix campaign manager Amy Langdon. “This has to give you pause about the character of this person and what type of congressman he would make.”
Oregon Right to Life, the leading anti-abortion group in Oregon, is now calling on Erickson to withdraw from the race, arguing he “betrayed the trust of his former girlfriend, prominent political organizations and every Republican voter” in the district. The group endorsed Erickson in his 2006 campaign but has since become one of his leading critics.
The group’s executive director, Gayle Atteberry, said that if Erickson wins the primary, the organization will not endorse him in the general. Without support from the state’s politically active anti-abortion community, Erickson’s chances of winning the seat would be significantly compromised.
“If he wins the primary, I personally cannot see how he can win in the general,” said Atteberry. “We can’t support him in the general election.”
Far from dropping out of the race, Erickson responded to the charges with an attack advertisement accusing Mannix of running a negative campaign “to hide his tax-raising record.”
So far, Erickson has spent $1.22 million of his own money to finance the campaign, which constituted the majority of his overall fundraising.
Mannix is a well-known political figure in Oregon, having won a reputation as one of the most effective legislators during his 10 years in the state House. Since then, he has sponsored a series of tough-on-crime referenda on the Oregon ballot, including mandatory minimum sentences for criminals, and authored a Victim’s Rights Amendment to the state constitution.
He has also twice run unsuccessfully for statewide political office. He lost a hotly contested gubernatorial race against Gov. Ted Kulongoski (D) in 2002 and a race for attorney general in 2000. Mannix carried the 5th District in both contests.
The Democratic nomination contest has been a much more low-key affair. State Sen. Kurt Schrader is heavily favored against Steve Marks, a chief of staff to former Gov. John Kitzhaber. Schrader has racked up the lion’s share of support from the state’s Democratic establishment.
“Whoever comes out of this primary is going to have higher negatives than the Democratic nominee, and that’s a major problem,” said David Wasserman, House analyst for the Cook Political Report.
“This race plays into a pattern we’ve seen throughout the country in special elections: Republicans are beating each other up before they even have a chance to get to the Democratic race.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10460.html
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