Smear campaign works against Pico Smear campaign works against Pico (March 05, 2004)

by Jeb Bing

T he talk of the town this week has centered on the primary and especially on a smear campaign by Moderate Democrats for California (MDC) and a Sacramento public relations agency it hired to personally attack Mayor Tom Pico in his bid for the 20th State Assembly District's Democratic Party nomination. We don't know if the flier mailed to 40,000 registered Democrats just ahead of the vote caused his defeat. But up until the packets went out, Pico was ahead in the polls and had raised more campaign contributions than the candidate MDC was supporting, Newark Vice Mayor Alberto Torrico, who won the race.

In case you missed it, the leaflet was a slick, red-colored flier that accused Pico of junketing "around the world many times," to China and Ireland at taxpayer expense. But MDC was wrong. Pico's one China trip was a highly publicized event paid for by the NBI Chinese American Computer Association and was part of a Beijing-Silicon Valley 2001 Technology Conference. As for Ireland, Pico's never been there. MDC's public relations firm, Townsend Raimundo Besler & Usher (TRB&U) and its hired research consultant, apparently confused Pico's occasional trips across the I-580 freeway to Dublin, Calif. with the city in Ireland. The consultant's single resource for information on Pico appears to have been www.opinionpleasanton.com, a creative, informative and often politically-slanted Web site owned and operated by Pleasanton businessman Bob Cordtz, a frequent Pico critic. Cordtz says that if the researcher had called him or taken time to sort through the Web site, he could have found a number of criticisms against Pico, but traveling to Ireland was never one of them. Just to be sure that nothing in the MDC allegations was true, City Manager Deborah McKeehan also had the city's Finance Department look into the charges, but found no checks written to Pico or anyone else for international travel.

In my many years in corporate and agency public relations, I've often come across material that skillfully stretched the truth to the advantage of a product or clients, but never lies or misinformation like those contained in the TRB&U piece. A PR firm's success depends on credibility, both with the media and the clients you serve. Lose that credibility and you're out of business. That's why it's hard to believe that a leading firm like TRB&U could let itself get caught producing such a scurrilous flier where not only the facts were wrong, but even the name of Pleasanton was misspelled as "Pleasonton." Surely, the firm's president and seasoned political strategist David Townsend or one of his four partners checks quick and dirty hit pieces they send out, even in the rush of a time-limited political campaign. With TRB&U handling the PR aspects of campaign budgets ranging from $100,000 to $50 million, clients beyond MDC must be reviewing the accuracy of materials the PR firm has sent out in their name as well.

At the national level, we're already seeing similar smear campaign materials. No doubt, there will be more from both political parties as Election 2004 now gets under way in earnest. Let's hope the basic research that goes in to producing these campaigns is better done and more accurate than we saw in the effort to keep Pico out of Sacramento.

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