Although we do feel this post deserves a broad reply, we have decided that these first posts will focus entirely on two questions:
1) Was Candice Schwager the Campaign Coordinator for Louis Guthrie for Sheriff?
2) What's the Fuss—Does it Really Matter if She Was or Was not Campaign Coordinator?
Was she Campaign Coordinator for Louis Guthrie for Sheriff?
(more after the jump)In August of 2011, the Louis Guthrie For Sheriff Campaign uploaded its first video's to YouTube to introduce the candidate to the voters. On August 28th, the absolute first tweet we can find concerning the Louis Guthrie campaign was:
@wahoomahi hey Scott. Candice, the Official Campaign Coordinator for Louis Guthrie for Sheriff!The tweet went to Scott McLemore, who at the time was Chairman of the Board of Candice's purported "non-profit" Attorneys for Special Needs Children (AFSNC.) So, the campaign's FIRST tweet is from its "Campaign Coordinator"—should it be about the candidate or about the coordinator? @NuSheriffNTown only tweeted once, as a little over 4 hours later, the first tweet was made from @Guthrie4Sheriff, which became the official twitter account of the campaign.
— Louis Guthrie (@NuSheriffNTown) August 28, 2011
So, if @NuSheriffNTown was not the official account, should we take that tweet with a grain of salt? Well, on Sept. 5th, Candice once again is identified as the "Campaign Coordinator" by the official twitter account with the following tweet:
For months after those first tweets, Candice tagged her bio's, resume's and profiles with being Campaign Coordinator for Louis Guthrie for Sheriff. A few examples: Mashable FriendFeed Shareholic PicassaWeb PeekYou Twitpic Branch Out even a marketing post preserved here and a teaser here.
In early 2012, Candice Schwager's blogging, tweeting and posting for Guthrie 4 Sheriff and against his opposition grew in frequency, quantity and negativity with each passing week. Utilizing her network of alias accounts, she worked to sway opinion, smear the opposition and create the appearance of support for her posts. We at CSBA feel that because of her confidence in her self described success of using the internet as a sort of weapon [read bully pulpit] in her previous endeavors, she felt she was above reproach. This included going after not just the school district, its employees, its attorneys or politicians; but former clients (here and here), former colleagues (here and here) and even an obscure indie rock band based in NY found themselves in her cross hairs at times. As she escalated her attacks both personally and professionally, she created a hostile cloud around herself that eventually spilled over to the campaign in a big way. As her personal drama mushroomed, she began to publicly accuse the opposition of a conspiracy to intimidate her as well as silence her. She claimed that they were hacking her and had taken down her various blogs and websites because they were afraid of the truth. CSBA has worked to preserve as many of those posts as possible because we feel that the truth is very important, that her posts should remain online and that nobody, including Candy, should remove them or silence her as the educational value is immense. We invite you to explore the rest of this blog to read Candy's posts that we have rescued from the abyss.
We have been told by those close to the Conservative Houston GOP that when Guthrie's poll numbers began to drop, Candy's continuing personal drama (epitomized here and here) became the scape goat. Although never confirmed publicly, it is our understanding that the campaign "expelled" her and demanded she stop all public activities on Guthrie4Sheriff's behalf around June 1st of 2012. The last campaign tweet from @Guthrie4Sheriff was on June 1st, 2012.
Since late May, Candice Schwager has gone out of her way to say she was not the "Campaign Manager" for Louis Guthrie. Despite this, Carl Pittman's Campaign for Sheriff picked up on a June 7th article that included an interview where comments attributed to Candice Schwager inferred that Mr. Pittman had murdered his former wife. Pittman issued a press release titled "Carl Pittman Responds To His Opponant's Lies" which can be found on on this page. In his response, Mr. Pittman puts it this way:
*snip* The unfounded and untrue negative attacks the Louis Guthrie campaign has engaged in are an all-time low for Harris County Republicans.
Louis Guthrie's campaign and specifically his campaign coordinator, Candice Schwager, have for months made outrageous allegations. To cite just one example of these lies, she was quoted in the Houston Press as saying that I “strangled and killed” someone. *snip*
Louis Guthrie for his part, was forced to respond after Carl Pittman posted this release. As reported by Guthrie supporter David Jennings in his article "Harris County Republican Party Sheriff Runoff: Louis Guthrie v Carl Pittman" during the June 19th debate between Guthrie and Pittman the subject of Candice Schwager was brought up by Pittman. Guthrie in follow up questions stated that Candice had volunteered early on in the campaign, and even had an official email address but about a month later Guthrie hired a professional coordinator and thus ended Candice's official involvement in the campaign. Jennigs writes:
"But the fact of the matter is that Mrs. Schwager is not an official employee or representative of Mr. Guthrie’s campaign and Mr. Pittman is not being honest when he claims that she is."So there it is, black and white, right? Not so fast—Big Jolly reader Adriana Duncan questioned Guthrie's statements in her comments here. On June 25th, Guthrie, thru his response to Jennings clarifies that the official campaign twitter count, @Guthrie4Sheriff was controlled by Candice, which to us would make her an official spox at least for the duration of the time she tweeted. He also noted that the twitter account had been turned over to the campaign tho, he did not say when it had been turned over, he does concede that it certainly wasn't as long ago as the campaign email account for candice had been turned over. Tho the campaign never responded as to when Candice stopped tweeting, we are confident in saying it was June 1st 2012 (@Guthrie4Sheriff has remained virtually silent since. for those keeping score-Candy spent a little over 9 months of representing the campaign as the woman behind the twitter curtain).
June 26th, Adriana posts a follow up note that points out that the @Guthrie4Sheriff twitter account had been scrubbed. We think that timing is a bit interesting, given the comments made just hours earlier. Since the contact page at louisguthrie.com even today shows @Guthrie4Sheriff as the official twitter account for the campaign, we can only imagine how big of a rush Guthrie was in to scrub Candice from the campaign.
Given Guthrie's statements, Campaign tweets & links, and Candice's various profiles there is no cut and dry answer to the question of if she was actually the campaign coordinator, even for a few weeks at the beginning. But, her own actions and posts certainly give the impression that she was. We think, given the evidence, a reasonable person would in fact conclude that she was the campaign coordinator until June 1st. Given her incredibly hands on involvement with the twitter account, her various blog posts, topix.com posts and the statements of her involvement in opposition research and legal issues, it is hard to imagine that she was not involved in some official capacity up until June 1st, when she tweeted her last Guthrie4Sheriff tweet. At the end of the day only Candice, Guthrie and maybe a hand full of other people know the exact extent of Candice's involvement with the campaign. Which leads us to the second question: Does it even matter?
This has been a long post, so we will leave question two to our second part.
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