Backpedaling

A friend of mine got the nicest Mother’s Day card this year—a postcard, actually. On the front is a photo of an adorable black and white puppy with a “Happy Mother’s Day” salutation. It’s just the sweetest thing.

Then there’s the flip side: a portrait of Butte County Supervisor Bill Connelly—“assessor for the people!” In the text area, the card reads: “To my mom and my wife, and to all the moms who work hard to provide a better life for their families. Happy Mother’s Day from my family to yours.”

I guess mine got lost in the mail.

In any case, this is either the most brilliant or sleaziest campaign mailer I’ve ever seen. I’m undecided.

Speaking of Connelly, I recently stumbled upon a link posted on one of our stories to a Youtube video of him speaking to the Magalia Tea Party. During his talk in early December, Connelly said medical marijuana should be knocked down from a schedule 1 to a schedule 2 narcotic and be sold in pharmacies at best and tobacco stores at worst. He went on to say that he’d talked to a reporter for a story that ran in the Sacramento News & Review about this stance, but that his position was not made clear.

Then he talked about how the CN&R called him to take his portrait because we were going to reprint the story in Chico. Connelly charges on the video that he told us he would “love to come in and talk to you, we could have a debate, we’re not always going to agree—blah, blah, blah.”

Newsflash: That never happened. Connelly never called this paper to clarify his position. He didn’t talk to me or any of the other editors about this. Moreover, he agreed to have his photo taken knowing full well that the story was about the failures of marijuana prohibition and the war on drugs.

What he did do, several weeks later, was send a letter to the editor via snail mail that said marijuana laws create the same problems as Prohibition did with alcohol and that the federal government should regulate pot for sale. In other words, he thinks it should be legalized and regulated like cigarettes and tobacco. That’s pretty much the gist of what was said in the story we printed.

So why the weird backpedaling at that Tea Party meeting? My guess is that Connelly was afraid of being labeled as pro-legalization as he was about to embark on a campaign for the assessor position in the June primary. Connelly has acknowledged that he represents thousands of pot-growers, but he knows thousands more in this conservative county are against cannabis.

I don’t appreciate Connelly’s squirrelly way of downplaying his stance. (He’s right. The only way to cure the ills of rogue growers, including the environmental degradation they cause, is to bring cannabis into the light through legalization.) But that’s not why he didn’t get CN&R’s endorsement for county assessor (see “Primary picks,” page 4). That’s simply because he’s unqualified.