By Sid Salter
March 05, 2008 12:54 am
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David Landrum seems at first blush the very picture of a credible 3rd District Republican congressional candidate - bright, articulate and pushing all the right GOP issue hot buttons.
Landrum's a "get tough" guy on illegal immigration. He's against "liberals in Washington" raising our taxes. He has spent close to $500,000 of his own money to run TV commercials telling voters that he "shares" their values.
Make no mistake; Landrum is a highly successful businessman. He has been generous with his time and wealth in civic and charitable work. If those were the only important "values" at issue, his campaign should be on cruise control toward a strong finish.
But the brief public record that Landrum has exhibited during this campaign suggests that regularly exercising the basic right to vote and taking responsibility for one's actions or inactions aren't among those values.
Landrum's was questioned early in the campaign about his personal voting record, particularly in 2003 when he donated to both Democrat Ronnie Musgrove and Republican Haley Barbour in the governor's race.
When I asked him about that, Landrum said that he cast an absentee ballot for Barbour because someone else had handled his voter registration and that his name wasn't on the voter rolls when he went to vote.
But after that exchange, Landrum's campaign released documentation purporting to show where Landrum and his wife had voted by absentee ballot in Hinds County. The documentation contained signatures from a Hinds County absentee voter roll that Landrum's campaign said were his and his wife's.
The signatures didn't appear genuine. I asked Landrum about it again in a later phone conversation and he was adamant that the signatures released by his campaign were his and his wife's signatures.
I had not asked about his wife's voting record because it didn't seem relevant, but the Landrum campaign volunteered them.
Landrum also went on Paul Gallo's talk radio show and claimed that the signatures released by his campaign were legitimate.
At the end of the day, The Clarion-Ledger found two women who said their signatures had been claimed by the Landrum campaign to be Mrs. Landrum's signatures. Comparisons of Mr. Landrum's signatures released by the campaign didn't match his signature from other public documents.
Landrum then changed his story and said that his campaign has released the documentation and the false signatures without his knowledge and approval and that he did not verify the signatures, several of which he then admitted were not his or his wife's.
Landrum still maintains that he voted and that the affidavit ballot is missing that would clear him and calls the whole affair "an honest mistake." All I can report is that there's no credible evidence of him casting that disputed 2003 ballot.
But the common thread here isn't the failure to regularly vote. It's the blame game.
Landrum didn't see to it that he was properly registered to vote, but he said that's someone else's fault. Landrum's signatures can't be verified and his affidavit ballot can't be found, but he said that's someone else's fault.
Landrum's campaign released false documents to the media purporting to document his voting, but he said that's someone else's fault inside his own campaign.
Bottom line, for whatever reason, David Landrum didn't manage his own votes very well over the last seven years. It apparently wasn't important enough to merit his personal involvement - so he relied on someone else. Now he's asking to be given the job of managing the only vote in Congress that the 710,000 people in the 3rd Congressional District have?
There's gotta be another candidate in this race for whom regular voting is a higher, more important priority than it apparently has been for David Landrum.
Contact Perspective Editor Sid Salter at (601) 961-7084 or e-mail ssalter@clarionledger.com. Visit his blog at http://www.clarionledger.com.
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