V23|NO24
has in large part failed to return the fire, and the strategy might be working. “As painful as it is to me, it appears to be backfiring,” he said of the personal attacks, and the results of a June 4 straw poll after the Vidalia debate seem to back him up. According to the Peach Pundit, a website covering Georgia politics, of the 102 votes cast after an evening in which Allen aired all of the above grievances, McLeod walked away as the clear cut winner, earning 55 votes. Dublin attorney Maria Sheffield came in second with 32, followed by Grovetown farmer Lee Anderson with 11. Allen garnered just four votes. “I stayed issue-oriented and we resonated,” McLeod said. “I believe that my sincerity comes across as far as what I want to do and why I’m running, so as long as I can keep deflecting the personal attacks and try to make it more of an issueoriented campaign, then we’re good.” Despite the “Mission 1st” sign at his campaign office, keeping to the issues isn’t always easy,
Mission 1st doesn’t allow for those kinds of impulses, he said, but it does strengthen his resolve. “My spin — you associate yourself with stuff like that, then that’s an indication of who you are,” he said. Paradise, a young campaign professional from Kansas, has found himself at the center of several aggressively fought races, including a 2010 Congressional race for the 4th District of Kansas and a 2011 campaign to unseat the incumbent attorney general in Louisiana, Jim Hood. In both races, the Paradise-run campaigns were notably forceful in their personal attacks against the opposing candidate. “They hit me for donating money to Ed Tarver when he ran against Charles Walker, even though they did the same thing, so I’m having a hard time on the hypocrisy level,” he said. “They gave to Champ [Walker], I gave to Tarver. He also gave to Ed Tarver — twice.” And the other donation — $7,100 to Rob Teilhet, who ran unsuccessfully for the 2010 Democratic
Wheeler Road, McLeod summed up the situation in five words — the place is a dump. “The lease says we assume 100 percent of all the repairs to get the building habitable,” he said. “Meaning the roof was leaking, there was no water, there was no power and the air conditioning was not working. And we only have a portion of the building — they continue to search for a subtenant for the other parts of the building, and the building remains for sale, which means that at any given time we have to be out in 30 days.” McLeod said he pays $1,000 rent for roughly 1,000 square feet, which is divided by the four owners, and they report an in-kind contribution of $250 a month. The complaint states he should be paying $6,000 a month due to the surrounding properties which, if divided by the four owners, would total more than the $2,500 maximum allowed contribution. McLeod also refuted the charge that the campaign stole donor information from the Allen campaign — charges that were leveled when Allen’s daughter
he said, especially when his daughter becomes involved. “I don’t want this to be a Wright McLeod/Rick Allen grudge match, but they’re very aggressive and they’ve made some very inappropriate remarks to my oldest daughter (a rising senior at Washington and Lee in Virginia),” he said. “Bar smack at the P.I. At least we used to call it bar smack. I don’t know what they call it now.” Whatever it’s called, McLeod said his daughter and some of the campaign’s interns were at the Partridge Inn when Allen’s campaign manager started making inappropriate comments about McLeod, not knowing that she was his daughter. Once informed, they allege he continued. “The hard part is not reacting in a way that you know is inappropriate,” he said. “Your first tendency is to grab and ax and bludgeon back, but that doesn’t serve any purpose.”
nomination for attorney general — was a donation to help a law school buddy, McLeod said. “The guy’s a good friend,” he said. “If I had known I would run for political office, I might have thought twice, but I don’t think so. He’s my friend, and I believed in him.” As for the FEC complaint, he alleged it so much chaff. “They accused me basically of lying, cheating and stealing, but at that point I didn’t realize what we were dealing with as far as the accuser,” McLeod said. “I think if I had known that a little more, I would have been more aggressive, but he’s done this before. This is how he runs campaigns.” Still, just because he’s aggressive doesn’t mean he’s wrong, so McLeod has found himself on the defensive. Accused of underreporting the rent donations associated with his campaign headquarters on
and son-in-law claimed they received McLeod campaign material. He maintained that all his campaign mail goes out of the Evans Post Office, while the offending letters had an Atlanta postmark. As for the third FEC allegation, that the campaign did not itemize $51,000 worth of personnel expenses, listing them simply as payroll, McLeod said he has since given them the list of names and that the numbers add up. “The only people that said we’ve done anything wrong are Scott Paradise and Rick Allen,” he said. That, and maybe Savannah Morning News writer Larry Petersen, who has been particularly harsh on McLeod. “All I can think back is, did I date his daughter in high school?” McLeod said, chuckling.
10 METROSPIRITAUGUSTA’S INDEPENDENT VOICE SINCE 1989
14JUNE2012