Post office pilfering: Who's hiding campaign mailings?

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Post+office+pilfering%3a+Who%27s+hiding+campaign+mailings%3f&articleId=61956d3e-5a2d-4f81-a6f9-491f8fe5ec9b

POLITICAL MAILINGS keep vanishing from Manchester's main post office, only to reappear after the elections they were intended to influence. One might suspect the legendary competence of the U.S. Postal Service. Funny thing is, the magical vanishing mailings all have one thing in common: they support candidates who oppose the Ray Buckley Democratic political machine in Manchester city elections.

In 2005, Republican Joe Kelly Levasseur ran against Democrat Pat Long, a union official supported by the Democratic machine. Mysteriously, some of Levasseur's mailings, dropped at the post office on Goffe's Falls Road, went missing. Levasseur sued, claiming that a part-time postal worker who was also the city Democratic committee secretary, hid his campaign mail. But the claim, coming from the litigious partisan gadfly, was met with skepticism. Long, by the way, won.

Fast forward to 2007, and Long found himself in a tight race against outsider Democrat Peter Sullivan. Sullivan beat Long without the help of the party, whose apparatus supported the incumbent. Lo and behold, Sullivan learned several weeks after the election that a bundle of his stamped campaign postcards somehow wound up undelivered though he dropped them at the Goffe's Falls Road post office well before the election.

I'd say they're lucky that anything gets delivered.

As much as I'd like to chalk this up to old fashioned incompetence, the signs point in the other direction.

In the course of the investigation into the Levasseur incident, it was discovered that a guy named Dave McCluskey worked part-time in the bulk mail acceptance center at the main post office in Manchester. McCluskey is also a Democratic ward chairman and the vice chair of the Manchester Labor Council, and a close friend of Pat Long, Levasseur's opponent.

The ONLY candidates who seem to have trouble with the mail are those who are opposing the "good old boy" wing of the Democratic party, be they Republicans or reformist Democrats.

scandal in 2002, which was NEVER properly addressed and investigated, which may easily have thrown the election of the governor to the grimey Republican.

The phone jamming affair didn't have anything to do with the governor's race. It was aimed at Shaheen for Senate activites.

The phone jamming thing has been thoroughly investigated; there have been indictments and convictions. I also think that its impact has been dramatically overblown. Jeanne Shaheen ran a lackluster race in 2002, and Sununu beat her by a convincing margin. Forty minutes worth of GOTV calls weren't going to change the outcome of that race.

Also, read the story. The candidate who was negatively affected by the mail pilfering is a lifelong Democrat and a very vocal Obama supporter. The race was between two Democrats, one supported by the shady Ray Buckley and the old Democratic hacks, the other an antiestablishment Democrat. If you're trying to make this partisan, you're grasping at straws