Eric Sundwall

(interesting notes on CD20)

http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=13543

'Push poll' calls on voters in 20th District

Residents in the 20th Congressional District have reported receiving a call early this week that some have described as a "push poll," which included negative, misleading and false information about Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand.
Several call recipients said it started out with fairly innocuous questions about whether the country is headed in the right direction and if President Bush is doing a good job. Next they were asked about who they planned to vote for: Gillibrand or U.S. Rep. John Sweeney, R-Clifton Park.
Bob Hudak, a Corinth resident who isn't enrolled in a political party, picked Gillibrand. He said he was then asked whether his choice would change if he knew she doesn't live in the district, that her law firm represented an Enron crook, or she had used the death of American soldiers in Iraq for political gain.
Gillibrand does now live in the district. Her firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, briefly represented former Enron finance chief Andrew Fastow, but she was not involved in the case. She has never, to Inside Politics' knowledge, used soldiers' deaths for political gain.
Last month, an anti-GOP/pro-Demo- cratic Party ad on the Web site of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is backing Gillibrand, featured a brief shot of flag-draped coffins in the back of a plane returning from Iraq.
Hudak said he found the death question so offensive he hung up on the pollster, only to have a different person call back the next night to finish answering the questions.
"I just couldn't believe it," Hudak said. "I follow politics enough to know there's not anybody out there running for Congress who is using the deaths of soldiers for political gain."
When pushed by respondents to identify who had ordered up the poll, the callers provided a phone number that led to Western Wats, a Utah-based research group that does data collection.
A Western Wats worker said the poll was commissioned by The Tarrance Group, a national Republican polling firm that does a lot of work for the National Republican Congressional Committee. She would not reveal on whose behalf The Tarrance Group is polling.
So far in this election cycle, the NRCC has paid The Tarrance Group $391,087 for various polls and travel reimbursements. According to a DCCC source, the NRCC recently paid The Tarrance Group $16,275 to do a poll for Sweeney in the 20th.
Neither the NRCC nor The Tarrance Group returned calls for comment.
Sweeney's campaign insisted it had nothing to do with the poll. Gillibrand spokeswoman Allison Price refused to accept that.
"Sweeney's record doesn't warrant re-election so he is forced to use dirty push polls to taint the opinion of voters," Price said. "Sweeney doesn't have to poll on his own record -- it is a rubber stamp for President Bush -- and we all know where Bush's approval ratings stand."
A Zogby International poll released Monday showed Bush's approval rating has dipped two points in the last three weeks to 34 percent, despite the Middle East cease-fire agreement and the foiling of an airline terror plot.
There are no townwide elections in Colonie this year, but that hasn't stopped Democrats from seizing the recent arrests of two town employees for stealing gas as another example of what they call lax ethical standards and poor oversight in the all-Republican government. "We have seen, yet again, the arrogance of power getting the best of our Colonie town government," Democratic Chairman Phil Steck said in a statement that added the thefts to a "chronology of misconduct."
The timeline begins in 2001, when a former general services director was fined for using a town snowplow for personal use. It includes a pending federal lawsuit that accuses the town of illegally accessing the private e-mail of would-be whistleblowers.
Robert Napier, 49, an equipment operator at the Colonie landfill, and 56-year-old Kenneth Plew, a water pump operator for the Latham Water Department, are accused of stealing more than $1,300 in gas in separate incidents.
Noting both men were arrested, town officials brushed off talk of a cover-up and said the oversight mechanisms clearly worked.
"Greed knows no political boundaries," Police Chief Steven Heider said. "Human nature has failings. Larceny is one of those failings."
"That's a good way of summing it up," Town Supervisor Mary Brizzell later added.
Inside Politics is compiled by staff writer Elizabeth Benjamin. Staff writer Jordan Carelo-Evangelist contributed to this column.
(8/21/2006)
- na, Albany Times Union, NY