Politics are a dirty game

Politics are a dirty game, that much is for sure. I remember witnessing it first hand when I helped a friend of mine run for local city council back when I was in college at East Carolina University. This would be the only time in my life that I would ever back a Democrat in anything. I don't think it really matters on the city level as much as it would in other things but even at this very low level of politics where he was attempting to take a seat away from a woman who had held that office, mostly unopposed for 20 years, the gloves came off properly.

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Bill Gheen (or as he is known when he is a political correspondent these days, "William") was a recent college graduate that was far more familiar with the needs of the college student population than 70 year old (making these numbers up, i don't remember as it was a long time ago) Inez Fridley, who was a resident of Greenville, North Carolina, but did not attend university in quite some time.

If it weren't for the existence of East Carolina University and its 30,000 students, it is easy to suggest that the city of Greenville, with its population of just over 100,000, probably wouldn't even be a medium-sized dot on the map. There is virtually no industry there, and the city exists for the sake of the students, which is the cash cow of the entire city. This same situations exists in many other "college towns" across the United States and probably the rest of the world as well.

Yet, the students didn't have any sort of representation on the city council at all. The people who had that position worked very hard to keep it that way. Bill meant to change that.

He was able to appeal to students and upon letting them know that they were the life's blood of the city and therefore should be represented, this resonated very well with the students. All of a sudden voter registrations were going through the roof as many of the students were not even aware that they were allowed to vote in local elections simply by changing their address. Most students were kept believing that they could only vote at their "permanent address" which for most students was their parents' address that was many many miles away, or in other cases, the other side of the country. For some reason a lot of our student mix actually hailed from Michigan and New Jersey, perhaps ECU advertises there... I have no idea.

Bill had a lot of good points in his run for office, but then one mistake happened and all of a sudden he found himself in hot water. His "office" (it was just his living room with some friends) sent out a mass mailer that pointed out the bad aspects of Inez Fridley's long-term reign as a city council member, whose office seemed to vote AGAINST almost anything that could be perceived as benefiting students, or giving them any sort of local rights.

The mistake they made was when they didn't put who the flyer was paid for by at the bottom. This is a requirement that you have probably noticed at the end of every electoral video where the person says "I am such and such and I approved this message."

Inez jumped at the opportunity, and with her connections that she had in the local papers and news stations, this tiny mistake became the entire focus of the small-time election. It was painted as scandalous and dirty tactics... it didn't seem to matter to the media that everything on the flier was true and they didn't focus on what the bulletpoints were at all. They only focused on the fact that it was in breach of campaign law.

Bill went on the record to showcase this, and they gave him almost no airtime whatsoever, the media was in the pocket of Inez Fridley. She then went on to post half-page ads in the student newspaper that focused on this, rather than her record, and had a picture of her that was 30 years old in it as well.

I was working with Bill and we started noticing that a lot of the yard signs in support of Bill also started disappearing. It still looked like Bill had a chance but then out of nowhere another young candidate entered the race and all of a sudden had a ton of money to be in the running. This person had never shown an interest in politics, nor was he wealthy. So where did the money come from? Well it came from Inez Fridley of course, and they were forced to reveal this information pursuant to election law.

You would think that this would be a massive, scandalous story, but the media didn't talk about it at all. Bill tried to purchase ad space in the student newspaper and even appealed to the editors for a story about this but no one would cover it... why? Because the media was all in the pocket of Inez Fridley.

Bill also offered to do a live debate on public access TV, but Fridley refused.

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Sorry for the terrible above image but I only put it there because it shows that Bill went on to be pretty successful anyway although he did change his political views dramatically.

He lost that city council election and the main reason why that happened is because once it became clear to the Fridley camp that he might end her 20 year reign, they took the gloves off and fought dirty. Instead of focusing on the very real problem of the students having no representation, they skewed the story to make Bill look like a dirty politician, even though the exact reverse was the case. He lost the election by nearly the exact amount of votes that the surprise 3rd candidate received.

This was my first exposure to "fake news" and why it is that I can totally believe that it exists on a large scale as well. I don't think you have to look very hard to see that this definitely happens on a state-wide and also national level and it is just a shame.

I really think that Bill would have been good for the community as a whole back in those days and I was there at the party the night that the vote tallies came in when he gave a concession speech with a smile on his face to thank us all for our hard work. Bill didn't lose because he was an inferior candidate, he lost because the system was rigged from the start.