So what’s a rookie candidate like Mike Lake to do when the frontrunners for state auditor - ex-state Labor Secretary Suzanne Bump and Worcester County Sheriff Guy Glodis - are getting ink and air time by bashing each other over Glodis’ ethics (or lack thereof) and public “clean elections” financing for Bump?
Go to the beach, that’s what.
Lake has been going blanket to blanket instead of door to door since June, trying to win voters’ hearts and minds and explain what the somewhat obscure office of auditor is all about.
“You’ve gotta go where the people are, not have them come to you. And in the summer, that’s the beach,” Lake said.
He says he’s met “thousands of people and only three have told me to leave them alone.”
He got rained out the past few days. But it’s Glodis who’s really all wet in his cynical denunciation of the modest amounts Bump and Lake have received in public matching money - funded by voluntary $1 checkoffs on state tax returns - as “welfare for politicians” that’s diverted from worthier causes.
It’s no such thing and Glodis knows it. Bump is right when she brands his tactic “dishonest, deceptive.” The $1 checkoff contributions are not diverted from the general fund; they come from a separate account that allows people who believe in clean elections to give a buck apiece.
There now is $1,563,839 in the clean elections fund, with Bump receiving $120,150 and Lake garnering $70,942. Glodis, by contrast, has accumulated $800,000 in private money, which frees the sheriff who would be auditor from the limits on campaign spending that clean elections recipients must obey.
Glodis was a state senator in 1998 when voters went 2-1 in a referendum for a system of public campaign funding intended to offset the influence of big money. And Glodis was among those in the Legislature who killed clean elections even though 59 percent of voters in his district had supported it at the polls.
And so went the leveling of the playing field that public funding offered to candidates who didn’t already hold elected office or who weren’t independently wealthy.
Such as Mike Lake. He’s a Northeastern University official, has never held public office and isn’t rich. But he’s what the late Hubert Humphrey used to call a “happy warrior” up against two veteran pols.
So Lake is out there doing inventive things like his beachcombing for votes. Sometimes he brings along the dog he found abandoned as a puppy and tied to a fence with a note around his neck that read, “I’m Charley. Please take me home.” Lake couldn’t resist, but he has nicknamed Charley “Top Watchdog” to go with his description of the auditor’s role in state government.
Once when he introduced himself on the beach, a suntanner told him, “Lake. That’s a good name for being so close to the water.”
And it’s a name voters should remember. A long shot, he may not win this time. But I hope he stays in the arena. It’s too soon to end this beach-blanket bingo.
