Rethuglicons... that's perfect!

--- In Bomppolitics@, "Perry L. Adler" homerramone2000@ wrote:

http://www.pressherald.com/news/nemi...19nemitz.shtml

Friday, December 19, 2003
COLUMN: Bill Nemitz

Bush-campaign saboteur gets an unlikely olive branch

Say what you will about George W. Bush. The man knows how to forgive and forget.

Three years after Tom Connolly dropped a fax of the president's old
drunken-driving conviction into the hands of local news media - and in the
process all but torched a presidential campaign just days before a historic
national election - the Portland lawyer finally heard back this week from the
man Connolly once referred to on his Web site as "Weinerboy."

It came in the mail on Wednesday. It's a computer-autographed, color picture of
the president and first lady Laura Bush, both smiling warmly from outside their
ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Below the picture, it says, "To: Thomas J. Connolly, Thank you for your early
commitment and dedication as a Charter Member of the Campaign in Maine.
Grassroots leaders like you are the key to building a winning team. Best wishes,
Laura Bush, George Bush."

"He needs me!" exulted Connolly, holding up the greeting in his Fore Street
office as if it were a first-class ticket to redemption. "He can't win without
me!"

To appreciate just what a triumph this is for Connolly, we need to look back
over what's happened since Nov. 2, 2000, when he passed a television reporter a
tip about Bush's 1976 OUI in Kennebunkport.

In short, it hasn't been pretty.

First came the death threats from Bush zealots convinced that Connolly, Maine's
1998 Democratic candidate for governor and a delegate to the 2000 Democratic
National Convention, was the hit man tapped by the Al Gore campaign to blindside
Bush with a last-minute smear as Election Day neared. To this day, Connolly
insists he acted at no one else's behest.

"The letters from Texas were especially bad - they call me an 'arse,' " Connolly
said, pointing to the mound of envelopes that he still keeps in a file drawer.
"And the phone calls - you wouldn't believe what some of these people said they
were going to do to me or my family."

But that was just the beginning.

Twice in the days following the election, while the recount in Florida dragged
on, Connolly was physically assaulted. Once, he said, a man got out of a pickup
truck on Congress Street, knocked him to the ground, got back in the pickup and
drove away. Then, one evening in a supermarket, another man rammed Connolly from
behind with a shopping cart and whacked him on the back of the head.

"I'm lying there on top of the Pampers wondering, 'What is this? What's going on
here?' " Connolly recalled. "And then the guy just takes his cart and hurries
away."

Then came the property damage.

"One day, someone smashed the back window of my car," Connolly said.

Another day, a pickup drove onto the front lawn of his home in Scarborough and
dumped a load of foam packing peanuts all over the place.

"You think it's funny now," Connolly said, wagging his finger. "But believe me,
it wasn't funny then. Those things were blowing all over the lawn for a year!"

Still another day, Connolly looked out his window to see a truckload of raw
garbage strewn across the yard. He spent hours combing through it, looking for a
name or address. "Nothing," he muttered.

It gets worse. As Bush prepared, at long last, for Inauguration Day, Connolly
began getting nasty notices from motor vehicle bureaus in three states: New
Jersey, Georgia and Louisiana. Each informed him that his license to drive had
been suspended in that state because he had failed to show proof of insurance
following an alleged accident there.

"In New Jersey, the report had me hitting Caroline Kennedy," Connolly said. "In
Georgia, they had me hitting Amy Carter . . . which was good, because it made it
a little easier to get it all cleared up."

Finally, there's the mail.

In what began as a trickle and eventually turned torrential, Connolly received
daily bundles of magazines and newspapers to which he had never subscribed. His
first reaction, and a naive one at that, was that they were "comps" sent by
countless news organizations to whom he'd granted interviews.

"But then they kept coming," he said. "It got to the point where we were
receiving about 300 a day. My favorite was Southern Living."

During the same time, he began receiving mail-order products - mostly involving
deals where you get the first one or two free and then pay for one a month
thereafter.

"Plates . . . figurines . . . Star Trek characters . . . Hummels . . " Connolly
said. "It got to the point where the UPS guy was coming by six, seven, eight,
nine, 10 times a day. My credit took a beating, let me tell you."

It eventually died down, although the subscriptions still flare up again
whenever current news - 11th-hour groping charges against California Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, for example - includes historical references to Bush's OUI.

Connolly has made it a point not to make a big deal out of his travails, for
fear they might start all over again.

But now, he figures, all that has changed.

Bush, after all, made it to the White House - even though his chief political
strategist, Karl Rove, publicly blamed Connolly for costing the president the
popular vote. And with Bush's re-election campaign in full swing, Connolly
trusts that the dirty tricksters are too focused on Howard Dean to worry about
him.

"And I've got this!" he said, holding up the smiling Bushes.

Don't bother reminding Connolly that he's been put on all kinds of Republican
mailing lists over the past three years (Dick Armey, Trent Lott . . .), or that
the warm-and-fuzzy photo of George and Laura came wrapped inside a "Bush-Cheney
'04" fund-raising letter. ("This election could be very close," it says. "The
Democrats will be relentless in attacking the President, distorting his record
and trying to mislead voters . . .")

No, Connolly reckons this is more than just a glitch in the GOP money machine.
This is an olive branch - and he for one is gentleman enough to accept it.

"Now," Connolly smiled, "let's see if I get a Christmas card."


emailtag Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at: bnemitz@p...

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