There's no doubt that three months before the November election polling showed Orange County Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez might be in danger of losing to Little Saigon state Assemblyman Van Tran.
To thwart Tran's potential rise, Sanchez–already known as a tireless campaigner–doubled her efforts. She even brought Bubba to Santa Ana where the ex-president told an adoring crowd that Sanchez had earned their respect in Congress.
Tran responded with an Anaheim rally with Sarah Palin and an infamous campaign move that has placed him (and his consulting firm) on the Sacramento Bee's political “worst” list for 2010.
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According to the Bee, Tran and Missouri-based Axiom Strategies won “worst new campaign tactic” for their anti-Sanchez scratch and sniff mailer that more than implied the Santa Ana Democrat was trash–or, at least, stinks like trash.
The paper said the mailer earned “a special sulfurous spot in campaign hell.”
There's another OC connection in the list.
Santa Ana chiropractic insurance king and ex-state Republican Party boss Michael J. Schroeder served in the inner circle of Steve Poizner's campaign for governor. In the race against Meg Whitman for the GOP nomination to face Jerry Brown, Poizner “decided to pander to xenophobes, blaming illegal immigration for nearly all of the state's ills,” according to the Bee.
In response, the paper pegged Poizner as committing 2010's “worst pander.”
You may recall that Whitman, who had her own pandering issues, trounced Poizner by nearly 40 percentage points.
Other categories identified by the Bee include:
–Worst ballot initiative;
–Worst strategic decision by a politician;
–Worst concealment of public information;
and
–Worst watchdog.
Read the entire list
HERE.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.