Hang onto your seats, disaster
lovers! The dynamics of the 2010 race for Orange County sheriff
changed this week with the candidacy of Craig Hunter, second in command at
the Anaheim Police Department. No need to consult your astrological
chart or the Mayan calendar for a deep meaning regarding the three H's running–Hunter, Hunt and Hutchens. The race is now ripe for brutal campaign combat.
Here's why: As it stands, incumbent but
electoral-untested Sandra Hutchens doesn't just need to get a plurality.
She must aim to get at least 50.1 percent of the vote or face the unsettling
potential of a runoff race. For Hunter and Bill Hunt, the former San Clemente
police chief who challenged sheriff-turned-felon Mike Carona in the 2006 race,
the odds inched up because a second-place finish doesn't automatically mean
defeat.
How could this fact translate
into campaign reality? Hutchens, who claims she abhors negative
campaigning–actually, campaigning in its entirety–could be in a strategy
predicament. If she fails to attack her challengers' suitability to lead the
nation's fifth-largest sheriff's department in the post-Carona-scandal era, she
risks allowing either Hunt or Hunter (or both) to go into Election Day with
energized support that will block her access to a 50 percent-plus-one vote
majority.
Meaningless chatter? Nope.
Just ask Carona. Once Orange County's most-beloved politician and an incumbent
with a huge fund-raising advantage, plus the slimy endorsement of Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger, he escaped a runoff with Hunt by 0.2 percent of the vote in 2006. Having closely followed that race, I can guarantee you Carona wouldn't have accomplished that feat
without a series of blistering negative attacks on the challengers.
Add this detail to the mix: A
key Carona strategist and man known to exploit any weakness he can find in
opponents is Mike Schroeder, the former chairman of the California Republican
Party. According to Frank Mickadeit at The Orange County Register today, Schroeder is already backing Hunter. To put it mildly, Schroeder isn't a fan of Hutchens
or, though he did meet with him several times earlier this year, Hunt.
–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.
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