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Damascus, Oregon, United States
I absolutely love anything that plugs in! My iPhone may just be an extension of my body. Networking, business, Christ, serving the community, husbandry, fatherhood, friends, and my amazing family are all that keep me ticking!

Friday, July 20, 2012

Come on Eileen!

I recently had some interesting interaction with a popular Portland mayoral candidate.  Eileen Brady, claimed founder of New Seasons Market, one of three, campaigning in the primary race for the 2012 Portland mayor election.  I heard on the radio a couple months back that she used a media firm based out of Chicago, without even a satellite presence in Portland.  Now, this may not be such a big deal to most, but since Ms. Brady was campaigning hard with the slogan, "Put a Job on it," I found it troublesome that she chose to outsource the girth of her media spending back east.  She even went as far as to parody the show Portlandia with it's ever-increasing fan-base and national cult following.  In this digitally connected age we live in, I thought I'd give social media a try and see what Eileen had to say about choosing not to use a local firm for her media.  

I shot a tweet her way and requested an answer on why she decided to use Chicago-based firm, mmmmmsociety, for her campaign media.  To no surprise of mine, she ignored me.  A few more of the same tweet over the following weeks and one last mention that I had been waiting 28 days for an answer, and she eventually sent me her generic request to take the discussion offline by emailing her so she could tell me about her "tremendous team".  What the heck, couldn't hurt to start some dialogue, right?  Well, it may hurt her already lame PR.  So I emailed and got a response claiming that "Ken Snyder and Terri Pickerill," I'm assuming the owners of the media firm, "are a great duo out of Chicago that do tremendous work.  They use Portland media team members to do their filming and production, etc.  All of my other team members are based in Portland."  As a voter, I felt as if I had been passed off by Eileen as a mere peon and that she had bigger fish to fry.  So I took my request back to the streets.  I tweeted back and requested a better, more specific answer.  "Ken and Terri from Chicago were the right match for me.  I have spent the cast majority of my money locally." Eileen tweeted back.  BINGO!  Now were were getting somewhere.

So I decided to check her facts on the Oregon Secretary of State website.  After all, all of her campaign finance information was public info.  Let's see if her claims were as she said they were.  Now keep in mind, I gave the "organic-lady" the benefit of the doubt on her numbers.  I tallied only the numbers above donations of $3,500.  So if I were to total all of them, they would look even worse against her claim of spending the "vast majority" of her money locally.

What I came up with was, out of $713,439 in total campaign expenditures, $508,202 were spent OUT OF THE STATE OF OREGON!!  What Eileen Brady publicly claimed as the "vast majority" only came to 28.8% of her campaign spending.  Please understand that I am no mathematician, I don't have an econ or poly-sci degree, and I don't claim to be an expert in much of anything, but I am pretty sure that 28.8% isn't a majority!  This means, using basis math, Eileen Brady, at that point in her campaign, spent 71.2% of her money out of state.  Turns out she is originally from Chicago, go figure!

After numerous requests for her to answer to these numbers, fielding a bunch of wannabe political advisors' tweets about how I don't understand the numbers, and what should have been a very embarrassed Eileen Brady ignoring my tweets, I still had no answer to her claim of how she spent her money.  Maybe this is my fault for expecting to have a claim of someone running for office actually add up against the hard data.  At any rate, what I do know is that she is going to have to take her dishonesty back to the drawing board if she wants to make another attempt at running for office again in the future.  I wonder if she is sitting there thinking, "what could have gone wrong?"

(Check my data, it's all there)