"There are plenty of Bridgewater faults and much to be concerned about; the problem is that if you blog something negative of Bridgewater, the Bridgewater folks all pat you on the head and think of you as their next convert.... We remain undecided in this race [between Lee and Bridgewater] as we have been..."Tonight the Bridgewater camp tweeted the following:
"@themostsearched Thank you. I am honored to have earned your vote yesterday. Appreciate your support."
The problem with the message tweet is that we have never given our support to either candidate. Indeed if we do so in the future, we will do so first on this blog. Being quite undecided as to whom to vote for on June 22nd, on Saturday we decided to start following both Mr. Bridgewater and Mr. Lee's tweets; indeed the measured time lapsed between following both could be measured in seconds. Many media and citizens follow not necessarily because they support or endorse a candidate, but because they want to be kept informed as to what's going on; such was the case with themostsearched.
While we're confident it would be easy to get the tweet corrected, the campaign masters at the Bridgewater camp would likely fall over backwards in apology for their error making us feel even more generous towards the Bridgewater campaign.
As themostsearched, back in October on our own efforts we launched the first major campaign against Bridgewater pointing out his FEC rule violation which got us a plug in the Salt Lake City Weekly and national blogger Riehl World View (not that we give a hoot for fame but we're small enough that we knew it would take more than our efforts alone to bring this issue up--so we're grateful for the coverage). As it turns out, the FEC really looks the other way on this rule below a $5000 threshold and we were unable to find evidence of violation of that $5K mark. We are finding other candidates across the nation seemingly guilty of the same charge so we'll give Bridgewater a legal break although ethically it did convey to the voters you aren't as honest as Abe.
The reason we bring this up is not only to clarify the record, but to provide further evidence to our Master Mr. Niceguy label of Tim Bridgewater: the campaign never spoke a word about the incident. In political strategy, this is of course the correct thing to do when the source has a voice so small it's drowned out; but Bridgewater could have come out swinging and lambasted us with his ego aflame--yet he chose not to. This doesn't seem the same Bridgewater in "fiery, bare-knuckled campaigns" against Swallow for Utah's 2nd Congressional seat.
There are early signs that Lee is learning the Mr. Niceguy game, but in 2010 Bridgewater is the Master Yoda.
++++ Followup 6/12:
If you like this article, try my one today entitled "Master Mr. Niceguy Goes Postal"
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