Not a Distinguished Campaign : Some Yaroslavsky 5th District campaign literature is very misleading

When we endorsed candidate Mike Feuer for the Fifth District seat on the Los Angeles City Council, we said that he had done the best job of presenting voters with a believable, reasonable and enthusiastic plan of action.

We also felt that his opponent, Barbara Yaroslavsky, had done an inadequate job of explaining her stand on issues. Little has changed.

In a recently distributed campaign mailer, the Yaroslavsky camp claimed to quote two Los Angeles Times articles that said Feuer acted “unethically throughout the campaign, including using a spy to obtain information from his opponent’s camp” and “knowingly jeopardized an organization’s nonprofit status by using their confidential mailing list to solicit campaign contributions.”

Our news stories said nothing of the sort. The Yaroslavsky mailer took these two Times stories out of context, severely misquoted them and added statements that The Times never made.

In fact, a letter to Yaroslavsky from The Times points out that Yaroslavsky campaign strategist Rick Taylor “concedes that he summarized The Times’ articles cited in the mailer and in places inserted his own opinions into the summary.”

The best possible explanation is that the Yaroslavsky camp made an honest but foolish mistake. That’s hardly reassuring. What kind of leadership can be expected from Yaroslavsky when her campaign manager can make such a fundamental and, however unintentionally, misleading error? Or when the candidate herself does such a poor job of overseeing her own campaign?

But this unfortunate episode also invites more invidious speculation, such as the possibility that the Yaroslavsky campaign knew full well what it was doing, and is desperately and deliberately trying to mislead voters. If so, that is one of the lower campaign tactics.

That’s why we find it ironic that the same Yaroslavsky mailer accused Feuer of doing “just about anything to get your vote.”