Schmidt's creak

The flood of election porn has begun here in Portland, and yesterday the mailman delivered the season's first glossy obscenity. Not surprisingly, it's a howler from the most desperate of all the candidates on the ballot:

This one may take the prize for the election's most misleading, as it makes our feckless district attorney out to be some sort of born-again law-and-order type. 

Is he kidding? Until he took a poll and saw that that his chances for re-election were in the tank, he was a vocal defender of the decriminalization of hard street drugs. Not to mention how he let downtown Portland be trashed by anarchists for close to a year, with next to nobody being prosecuted for any of it. But now suddenly he's got religion. Look out criminals, he's coming for you! Twenty lashes with a wet noodle!

Mikey's mailer is obvious baloney, and long past its best-by date.

Meanwhile, I note another oddity in his mail pitch, and it seems to be part of a trend. Although his race is nonpartisan, Mikey reminds us no less than three times that he's a member of a certain political party.

We've seen this before, and not too long ago. Rene Gonzalez put a "D" next to his name on his webpage when he was running for Portland City Council, another nonpartisan position. Apparently, these guys' doing such things doesn't break any laws, although it definitely seems to violate the spirit of a nonpartisan election. What next, will the judges be doing it, too?

In Gonzalez's case, I'm sure it was to dispel any notion that his relatively conservative views came from his being a Trumpy. But in this year's d.a. race, it's just the opposite. Nobody would mistake Mikey for a Republican; the idea is to imply that his opponent, Nathan Vasquez, is a Republican. It worked to kill off Betsy Johnson's campaign for governor. (And with thinly veiled help from the Weed, I might add.) The Schmidtters are borrowing that move from the Kotek playbook to create a poison impression of their opponent. 

For the record, by all accounts Vasquez is a former Republican, who wisely defected from that dubious party when Orange Caligula took it over. But party affiliations are supposed to be irrelevant. Call me crazy, but I like prosecutors who live up to the spirit of the law as well as its letter.

And besides, there oughta be a letter of a law against candidates in nonpartisan races touting their party affiliations in their campaign literature. Somebody should ask all the old dudes running for Oregon Secretary of State what they think of Mikey's ploy. See which of them can tell you what the rules are, and say something intelligent about what they should be.