Denneny Campaign Behaves Extremely Unethically
When Doug Denneny first entered the Congressional race in the 11th district, he really portrayed himself as being above all the stunts that have caused people to distrust politicians.
He even claimed during a live blog that he “will run a clean and ethical campaign and expect the same from my staff. I am the only candidate who has an ethics section on my website, and I will stand by my word. I can control my staff, but I can only admonish my supporters.”
In the last few days, however, Denneny’s campaign has clearly broken that campaign pledge while trying to pull off a stunt that proves to be one of the worst political offenses so far this primary season. During a stunt that was perhaps staged so that the campaign could make Gerry Connolly and Leslie Byrne look bad, Denneny’s campaign tried to force Young Democrats into sponsoring a debate on extremely short notice. Even after the organizations said they wouldn’t sponsor the debate, Denneny’s campaign made multiple false claims about being invited to this non-existent debate and lied about the debate being confirmed.
The following is my account of how I found out that Denneny’s press release involved completely fabricated facts and risked ruining the reputation of various Democratic organizations.
Denneny’s campaign sent out a press release on Thursday evening saying that he would be participating in a debate at GMU on April 14 and he hoped the other candidates would attend too. I immediately thought several things were odd about this. The most obvious were that 1) the press release mentioned the FCYD’s and not the GMU YD’s (which was strange since the debate was supposedly happening at GMU), 2) I hadn’t heard about even any preliminary talks on setting up a debate at GMU and I’m a student there who’s active in Democratic politics, and 3) the press release didn’t include any mention of a time or specific location on campus.
So before I put up a post about the debate, I decided to call sources with the other campaigns to see if they were participating. None of them had even heard about it. As a source with knowledge about Leslie Byrne’s campaign put it, this was very interesting because she hadn’t been invited and she had even been at a GMU Dems event two weeks ago. With the Denneny’s campaign losing more credibility by the second, I got in touch with an officer in the GMU Democrats organization to see if he even knew anything about it. That’s when I seemed to begin getting some real answers.
Apparently Doug’s campaign had called the GMU Democrats to see if they would host a debate on April 14. They responded by saying that the notice was too short to fully organize the debate and it was also unfair to the other campaigns because they might have already had commitments on that date. With that option out of consideration, the Denneny campaign then turned to the Fairfax County Young Democrats, which is an organization that has several of Doug’s key supporters among its members. Even the leaders of FCYD, however, were uneasy about committing to the debate due to various issues.
When Doug’s campaign was contacted about the fact that the other campaigns didn’t seem to know about the debate and that both the GMU Democrats and FCYD wouldn’t confirm that a debate was going to take place, their campaign then lost even more credibility by continuing to insist that there were plenty of student groups who were planning on sponsoring the debate. When further pressed on which groups were willing to sponsor the debate, however, Doug’s communications director didn’t provide any and informed me that all future questions about the debate should be addressed to FCYD.
It appears as though the Denneny campaign got so far astray with its sleazy tactics that they didn’t take into consideration that FCYD wasn’t on board with the debate. In an email exchange, for instance, the president of FCYD said
“Any conversation about the debate had been speculative at best. While the Denneny press release indicates otherwise, the FCYD are not currently sponsoring a debate.”
In other words, Denneny’s campaign lied about a debate being confirmed, risked ruining the reputation of the Young Democrats who were unwillingly dragged into the controversy, and continues to use sleazy tactics even when confronted with evidence that their campaign behaves unethically.
This is extremely disturbing at a time when the other candidates in the race have proven their desire to get younger voters involved in the political process. Doug claims to be responsible for his staff and promised they would conduct a positive campaign, so he now needs to admit they mislead the public about this debate and begin discussing the issues like the other candidates in this race.
Filed under: Doug Denneny, Politics, VA-11th, Virginia Politics
This is just weird as can be. Looks like it’s amateur hour over at Doug’s campaign.
Doug never really had a chance to win but he could have been a great addition to the Democratic Party with all of his military knowledge. His campaign’s behavior has ruined that option.
Unethical to want a debate?
Leslie can’t take the night off from smoking cigars with the party insiders to talk to students?
FCYD too busy doing nothing?
No debates or rallies have ever been organized in less than 10 days?
Virginia: Byrne Hits M. Warner Over Forum No-Show.” The Hotline- 5/20/96
ex-Rep. Leslie Byrne (D) accused Warner of “ducking debates and challenged him to three debates ‘any time, any place, anywhere.’ ” Warner responded he would be “glad to debate Byrne and accused her of negative campaigning ‘as usual.’” Byrne: “Mark Warner chose to miss yet another opportunity to discuss the issues with Virginians, after assurances he would be there.”
The unethical behavior isn’t wanting to debate. If you read the post you’d notice the campaign made up the debate and then lied about the various groups confirming that the debate would happen. That’s unethical.
I hope this is just his staff acting like this cause Doug always seemed like a good guy. I hope he comes out and denounces this type of behavior.
It’s a shame that Doug has fallen into this sort of crap, he really is a nice guy. This is a prime example of a guy falling into a crowd of folks who are doing him a great disservice. The “key supporters” of his are a bunch hacks who saw this as an opportunity to “play campaign.” I guess he should have thought twice about tying his career to people like that, but I still feel bad for the guy.
It seems more like amateur hour for an inexperienced campaign staff than Doug personally being unethical. But I agree that this sort of behavior on the part of his staff doesn’t help his chances in the primary.
Truth be told, I don’t think many people expect him to win the primary, but it’s giving him name recognition, which could make him credible for a future race. But stunts like this could even hurt that opportunity.
Everyone seems to be getting at the point that Doug’s a real good guy but that it’s his campaign team that’s just out of control.
If he wants to have a political future I think there need to be some staff changes.
You are so right about Doug’s “campaign staff.”
I heard his communication’s director is nothing more than a pajama-clad bloggers who’s never worked for a real campaign and still lives with his parents.
This isn’t the first time that his campaign team has done something that could harm his political future. Hopefully Doug will eventually realize that his campaign team needs some restructuring. It’s just a shame that this “amatuer hour” is the campaign for a guy who could help out Democrats who need to learn more about military affairs. It could ruin the political career of a guy who could really do some good for the party.
I agree completely. Doug should really consult bloggers more often for political advice.
If the Denneny campaign chooses not clarify the situation here (or at RK where James Martin has linked to this post), the least they can do is use their own website to explain. They still have the press release front and center. Doug maintains his own blog there, too. He should use it.
Or, they could just individually phone the commenters who don’t comment anonymously. Just kidding. No campaign running on all cylinders would do that.
C’mon Doug, Kevin, someone, defend yourselves.
They can’t defend themselves because they know they lied about the debate. It’d be one thing if they just sent out an incorrect press release but it looks like they also lied about it in multiple emails after someone figured out what happened.
The comment of Doug’s that Bryan highlighted early in the post clearly says that Doug won’t tolerate anything but positive campaigning from his staff. Even if he didn’t know about it his staff still lied about the debate. That means someone needs to go if Doug is going to keep his campaign pledge.
It just doesn’t make sense to me that they’d leave the press release up on their website and let all these allegations go unaddressed publicly. I wonder if they actually think screwing up like this is not a bug, but a feature of their new-kind-of- candidate campaign. I’d like to think VA-11 is too sophisticated to fall for such a ploy, but, if Connolly and Byrne were to collapse….
Of course, if Connolly, Byrne, and Denneny were to collapse, we might see Rep. Lori Alexander.
Joel — I think what most commenters here are saying is that a lot of the actions taken by Denneny’s staff just don’t make sense — not just how they’re handling this situation. That’s a shame because Doug could have made a decent run if he didn’t have such a pitiful staff.
Not too anonymous,
I don’t think you can blame Denneny’s staff for Denneny’s inaccurately characterizing The Responsible Plan to end the war as contrived by a p.r. firm.
I don’t think you can blame Denneny’s staff for Denneny’s characterizing Connolly’s plan to make low-cost homes available to poorer people as violative of the free market, as if Denneny’s targeted tax subsidies aren’t, and besides what’s so great about the free market anyway? Don’t a lot of very knowledgeable economic experts think that one reason we’re as bad off now as we are is too little regulation and intervention in the so-called free market?
Denneny himself in a liveblog at RK demonstrated he also didn’t grasp the issue of gay marriage, by saying he was for both gay marriage and civil unions.
Good guy or no, one has to wonder about the quality of a candidate/manager who would allow his staff to let him down time and time again, if that is what’s happening.
Perhaps you know more than what’s available publicly about how good a candidate Denneny could have been. IMHO, I don’t think he could have made a decent run, if, by decent, one means competitive against the heavyweights, Connolly and Byrne.
I’ve been hearing a lot of crazy things about Doug’s communications director mocking bloggers and members of the press who even remotely question what he says. I even received a mass email from him today that was mocking Bryan and suggested the post should be ignored because it’s “long and rambling.” Hellllooooo…. it’s long because it takes awhile to explain how the campaign continued acting so sleazy after someone confronted them about it.
Someone needs to tell Doug to get rid of the guy if he wants to keep any sort of credibility.
The halarious thing is that there’s only been one person who even tried to defend the Denneny campaign here. That would seem to suggest they know something fishy was actually going on.
Where’s the main stream media on this? They should be all over this because it looks like the Denneny camp was trying to get the media to be a part of this plot.
Obviously the mainstream media needs to take lessons from bloggers who do nothing but report the truth from their parents basements like Ben Tribbet and the other slackers in the blogosphere. We at the Not Doug Denneny campaign fully support that.
Usually the only reason for the mainstream media not to pick something up from the blogs is that they might not know how reliable the information is. The facts are pretty well laid out here so I don’t know what the problem is because this seems like an issue they should be concerned about.
deneny is paying electeds back . the new neighborhood directory just came out and for the first time in decades, there are no pictures of electeds like bullova, peterson, davis, ormsbey, smith and connelly. just a bunch of pictures of president deneny and assistant cub scoutmaster deneny. none of those electeds endorsed deneny, so deneny kept their pictures out.
“Denneny Strikes Back” is onto something that everyone needs to consider. Doug might try to portray himself as above political stunts but it looks like both him and his staff are actually the people who are using sleazy tactics.
[...] a debate” happening at GMU. This was followed by an article on Friday by Bryan Scrafford (link) blasting the campaign for creating a debate and forcing Fairfax County organizations (specifically [...]
I think that though this is “stunt-ish” behavior by the Denneny campaign… I personally believe there should be a couple of debates with the four candidates. (In May however, not April 14)
What are your thoughts on a debate in general (not this particular one on April 14?)
Nobody is against having a debate.
People are against having a campaign blatantly lie in press releases, lie when confronted with evidence that the press release was wrong, potentially harm Democratic organizations by dragging them into the controversy, and try to smear grassroots activists who call them out on their lies.
It’s kind of interesting that the only way the Denneny can get real coverage is by getting called out on their sleazy tactics.
Some of the commenters are forgetting that Doug came out and said he would be responsible for his staff’s actions. He’s breaking that campaign pledge by just allowing the campaign staff to blatantly lie and take down other organizations with it. People need to hold Doug to his campaign promises.
It’s pretty funny that this politically purple guy is the only person that really even comes close to defending the Denneny campaign. It does them no good though cause even he is saying he wants to see a debate but Doug shouldn’t have pulled this stunt.
I guess it’s pretty safe to say that the Denneny campaign royally screwed this up. Too bad, though, I would have liked to have heard more from Doug
The fact that they’re not even responding — or can’t get their response covered in the blogosphere — illustrates just how horrible the campaign staff is.
Doug, hire a new team. Even if it means you don’t win this time at least you’ll be able to keep some respect after the race is over.
Maybe they haven’t had time to respond because they are too busy planning their “March on Washington”. Another stunt to try to grab some attention…
Here’s what George Burke had to say in a comment thread at RK:
The 11th Congressional District Democratic Committee plans to sponsor four debates prior to the June 10th primary featuring all 11th CD Democratic candidates.
One debate will be held on Fairfax TV Channel 10 and one each will be held in the three jurisdictions in the 11th CD — Fairfax County, Prince William County, and Fairfax City.
The 11th CD Committee receives the petitions gathered by the congressional candidates and then certifies them to the State Board of Elections so the candidates earn a spot on the primary ballot. So far, two of the candidates — Byrne and Connolly — have submitted their petitions and other paperwork to the 11th CD. The other two candidates have until the April 11 deadline to meet the requirements to be on the ballot.
– George Burke, Chair
11th CD Democratic Committee
With Denneny’s not-ready-for-prime-time mistakes piling up (the latest is being proud of the endorsement of arch-conservative Gene Taylor), perhaps it’s best if he doesn’t submit his petitions by Friday and drops out.
Wow. Looks like Denneny’s campaign really had no excuse for it’s behavior since there were debates being planned anyways. He needs to either publicly explain why the campaign lied or get out of the race.
With the campaign staff so incompetent they might not even have enough signatures to get him on the ballot.
Someone needs to ask the people why they endorsed a candidate whose staff is made up of kids who have absolutely no idea how to run a campaign and will ruin any chance he has of being successful.
It’s kind of funny that the person who used the alias “Not Kevin Franck” uses a play on Denneny’s communications director and links to a website that criticizes every democratic candidate except Denneny. Seems to suggest that it’s someone from Denneny’s campaign who’s actually writing the comments.
I just don’t get why Doug Denneny hasn’t come out and addressed this issue. He said he’d condemn any negative campaigning by his staff when he first started running but now he’s just letting them do all sorts of crazy things and hasn’t said a peep.
[...] for what their campaign does, the Washington Post has published an article which reports on the story I broke earlier this month. Some Democrats say Denneny has at times overreached in his zeal to get [...]