Skip to main content

The Delaware Way: This is called keeping your bets hedged

When Libertarian 5th District Senate candidate Scott Gesty and I were first discussing his campaign, he talked about the fact that the choices offered to Delaware voters by the Republicans and Democrats are pretty much indistinguishable.

This was the specific example he gave:
Last cycle, I got direct mail from the teachers union supporting my democrat opponent [Chris Counihan], and then the next day I get the same direct mail with my Republican Senators [Cathy Cloutier] face on it!  It was nuts.  I didn’t vote for Senate in 2010.  There was no choice . . . 
At first I found this difficult to credit, but when I was looking up the campaign donations for each candidate in that race, I made an intriguing discovery.

In 2010 the law firm of Young, Conaway, Stargatt & Taylor used its PAC on 29 September to give $300 to Christopher Counihan.

Almost exactly one month later, Young, Conaway, Stargatt & Taylor used its PAC (25 October) to give $300 to Catherine Cloutier.

Both records can be accessed via the Commissioner of Elections website.

Young, Conaway, Stargatt & Taylor is one of Delaware's heavy-hitter law firms, which invests heavily in our elections, spending nearly $29,000 in contributions via its PAC in 2010.

One of the few glimpses into the inner workings of such a major player in our electoral politics came in 2010, when Above The Law ran a post on how Young Conaway controller Joe Lofink accidentally "outed" all of the firm's non-equity partners.  For those interested in the interconnections of Delaware politics, cross-indexing that list against the list of candidates receiving Young Conaway campaign donations is interesting.

But the question does remain:  what interests would you be protecting by donating to both the Democrat and Republican in the same race?

And Scott?

Let us know when the check comes, will you?

Comments

Jim Fryar said…
I remember my father, a WW2 veteran saying there was an expression, "Praise the Lord and respect the Devil and you can't go wrong." This could be something similar, except perhaps its, "Praise Lucifer and respect the Devil."
Nancy Willing said…
ooh, can't wait to dig in.
Scott Gesty said…
I have a gut feeling that particular check wont be heading my way.

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

Soda tax debate reveals fundamental progressive assertions about your lack of individual rights and the "responsiblities" of the State

I thought it would be at least amusing to use the Delawareliberal comments as sub-headings regarding each category of what is wrong with the proposed tax on sodas and juice drinks. But there are so many different little strands of each comment that it would be impossible to pull them all out. So, instead, I'm going to let you read them in more or less the order they appeared, and note the assumptions. pandora: I’m perfectly okay with taxing sodas and juice drinks. Mainly because they’re total crap, and one of the main reasons our country’s children are overweight. They are also dirt cheap. Assumptions here: (1) Because "I" am perfectly okay with a new tax it should be imposed on everybody; (2) it is the government's responsibility to keep children from being obese; (3) the cheapness of the product to be taxed justifies charging people more for it. John Manifold: Soda fattens your kids [and you and your husband], shortens their lives, costs more than water [a...