Campaign Tactics Are Heating Up District 3 Races Political Rhetoric Includes Drug Issues, Communist Influences

Third District legislative campaigns are turning malicious as one candidate is increasingly cast as a pot-head and another tarred as a communist.

Renegade yard signs portray Democrat Alex Wood as the statehouse candidate for marijuana smokers and everyone else who wants to legalize drugs.

The mock imitations of Wood’s own signs turn the former radio personality’s signature microphone into a smoking joint. At the bottom: “Paid for by Southside hemp growers.”

Wood’s opponent, Republican Brendon Hill, said he doesn’t know who’s behind the handmade signs. He said he fears they reflect poorly on him, not Wood.

But Hill, a wine steward at Patsy Clark’s, put up his own signs highlighting Wood’s admission that he would like to see drugs legalized as “an experiment.”

Hill’s signs say: “Say no to Alex Wood. Say no to legalizing drugs. Vote for Hill.”

Hill said he had no choice but to hammer on the drugs issue “because it’s the only issue Alex has been clear on.”

Wood said he resents the handmade signs, but called Hill’s signs “legitimate, even though they misstate my point.”

Wood said he wouldn’t vote to legalize drugs unless he was convinced a majority of his constituents supported the plan.

Meanwhile, as the election nears, 3rd District Senate candidate Lisa Brown is assailed on talk radio and in letters to the editor for teaching economics in Nicaragua while the Sandinistas reigned in 1990.

Her opponent, Republican Sen. John Moyer, insists he will stick to the issues and not make any personal attacks. But his campaign recently prepared a radio advertisement to fuel suspicion of Brown’s alleged communist leanings.

The ad was spiked after an announcer hired for the narration objected to the content and refused to perform it.

“It was really pretty awful,” said the woman who declined to read the ad. “I said, ‘I’m not going to read this,’ and they said, ‘Fine.”’

The woman - who asked not to be named for fear of losing future work - said the ad opened with something like: “Lisa Brown is the most liberal legislator Washington has ever had … She spent six months in Nicaragua … She must be a communist.”

The woman admitted she liked Brown, but said she would have done the ad if it wasn’t so nasty. “If it was a straight-forward, ‘Vote for John Moyer,’ I would have done that.”

Moyer’s campaign manager, Erik Skaggs, said the ad was torpedoed soon after the announcer refused to read it. “That was a red flag for us,” he said, adding Moyer ordered the campaign to stick to Brown’s voting record.

Brown said she found the Sandinista issue both amusing and annoying.

“It really is reminiscent of McCarthyism where you really just call people names,” the Democrat said. “But it doesn’t scare me, because I’m real secure with why I went down there.”

Brown said she objected then to the United States’ hardline policy against the Sandinistas, but she also notes she was down there teaching people how capitalism works.

, DataTimes