Suppose you’re an incumbent Congressman, and you’re locked in a tight and expensive battle for reelection against another incumbent Congressman (thanks to the magic of redistricting). One day you take your kid to school and see a ton of signs for your opponent plastered all over the place, which they shouldn’t be as this is a school and all. You call a press conference to denounce the inappropriate sign-placing instead of calling your opponent and telling him to take back his signs.
And then it turns out that your opponent had a pile of his signs stolen the previous night. And it turns out that you yourself were once cited by the police for participating in sign-stealing in your last election. Which your opponent knows all about, and is now reminding everyone about.
Oops.
That’s how Pete Sessions’ day has gone today. You can see the police report here, or if you don’t like Adobe Acrobat you can see it in JPG form here and here. Once again, I say “Oops”.
UPDATE: Josh Marshall has more background on Sessions’ sign-stealing citation, and some reaction from Sessions’ campaign manager.
Once again, you outdo me in your illustriousness.
It’s sort of like complaining the Bush campaign is distorting your Senate Intelligence committee record, only to have the chairman come out and say he’d be pleased to release that record to the press with the Senator’s permission (AFTER staff confused its own candidate with Bob Kerrey previously). OUCH! Just gotta love walking into those punches.
In any case, those signs didn’t belong in the classroom, and the Kerry people surely felt they had to respond (because response is everything these days in politics), but these probably weren’t the most brilliant tactical manveuvers in either case.