Thursday, July 21st, 2005...6:50 am
Jet City Woman
There are a bunch of different things I’ve been meaning to write about. I always think I can write little snippets about a few things, but that never works because I’m a verbose freak and I end up writing long novellas about one topic. I may post more than one entry today to get all of this out of my system. This will not be a common occurence; I have a job. Not much of a social life, though.
I wanted to write about the nasty things that the Republicans have already been saying about Jim Pedersen, but the press release area on their website appears to be chingered up, so this one will have to wait.
I made so much fun of those poor College Republicans a couple of weeks ago (twice even!), that it is only fair that I take down some of our own. A 3R correspondent sent me an item about Julie Anne Kempf, who was a mover in the Young Democrats until she aged out about five years ago. She was an administrator in the King County (WA) elections office until 2002, when she was removed because of a scandal envolving absentee ballots.
She was part of a sort of King County Mafia in the YDA. These were the days when it was hard to know what the YDA was for, except for padding people’s resumes. It seemed to be her job to make sure that the people whos resumes were padded were from Seattle. All of them had to be from Seattle. The logic seemed to be “We gave you Nirvana, the 747 and the General Protection Fault…we deserve all the cake.” I overheard Kempf one time being livid because the Washington Young Democrats (ie-King County) did not get every regional appointment.
Yeah, there was a lot of political game playing, it was a political organization. There was a guy that from Ohio who had his fingers in everything, but he respected his opponents, and could be dealt with. But that crowd wanted all or nothing. To me, it was emblematic of the pettiness and amateurishness of the organization.
When the silliness happened this year over the election of Christine Gregoire, I couldn’t help but think that the only thing that gave the Republicans even the barest sliver of an argument was the shenanigans that went on there when Kempf was in charge.
At least two of the Young Democrats of Washington that she ran with are prosecutors. Ironic if they were on the case, eh?
I wonder how much of her behavior in the office mirrored the sort of stuff that was carried on and encouraged in the YDA. Did we train her for this?
Maybe I’m being unfair; Kempf was always friendly to me. Only trouble is, I’d later hear about some weirdness she’d pull against a friend of mine. Franky, I was pretty small potatoes and regarded as a lightweight in the organization, and probably not worth her wrath. I’m pretty sure that she was opposed to having the YDA Convention in Tucson a few years ago, but she and her crowd were already on the wane.
This is what makes us so different from the CRs. I mean, a former official in the YDA being envolved with election shenanigans gets prosecuted. Wow, I wonder if a former CR president did something like, blow the cover of a CIA agent, would he get prosecuted? Hmm. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if anything like that happens.
1 Comment
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:35 am
No what makes us different is when one our own does something like what this woman did, we admit it, condemn the act publicly and privately and work to insure it does not happen again. The other side however only admits when they absolutely have to, only condemn it when they are forced to, and privately encourage the behavior.
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