Back in 1999, I was doing some campaign work for former US House member Mary Rose Oakar....

n her run for Mayor of Cleveland.

She gained some national notoriety as one of the Democrats caught up in the 1992 scandal with the House Post Office.

I had run against her in the primary and for some reason the Cleveland Plain Dealer endorsed me in the Primary.

Of course I didn't win but I gained some notoriety.

Being the good democrat, I campaigned for her in the fall. She lost the seat to Martin Hoak which ultimately lead to Dennis Kucinich to win that house seat in 1996, the same year I ran for the State Senate and got to know DK pretty well as we shared the stage as our districts over lapped.

Anyway, the reason I bring up all of this is to show how things fall out.

BTW, both MRO and DK started as Cleveland City Council members and both were fierce defenders of their people. That also paved the way for their success in the House because they did whatever they could for the people in their districts.

Back to 1999. I had done some polling work at the local level and was getting pretty good results because I was able to put together a real good calling database by setting up a dump between a national phone book data base and the data base at the Board of elections. Can't do that anymore, too expensive.

Long story short, Mary Rose hired Rass to do her polling because of his connections to the National Arab association. Mary Rose was Lebanese. I worked with him on this poll. From what I gather, he conducts the daily stuff on the cheap as has been explained here many times. But when he does deep polling, he does it just like everyone else.

Now since he was hired by Mary Rose, I just assumed he was a democratic pollster. I talked to him on the phone several times and met with him on more than one occasion.

Mary Rose lost by 8%, coming in third in a primary when th top two go at it in the General. One of the candidates hired me to do his data base and I ended up working with Lou Stokes. Not an easy guy to deal with.

Shortly after that, the national phone data was only available on a per number basis which made it far too expensive for me to continue.

Curiously, my next mentor was Jimmy Demora who just got sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for corruption. I left him in 2002 when my health started to fail. I never knew anything about JD's chargeable offensives. In fact he sought me out to be the Party's Treasurer because of my squeaky clean reputation as an accountant and a candidate.

Just wanted to share a little of my experience in the political world.