District 9 Dirty Campaigning

Tuesday's Star-Telegram revealed that the candidate behind the District 9 City Council race phone poll was ... Joel Burns.

Burns, a city zoning commissioner, acknowledged that his campaign conducted the poll but said it was not a push poll because it targeted only 360 voters. He said he approved all the wording in the survey.

"It was a poll to test a wide variety of things and potential perceptions," he told the S-T. "It was testing positives and negatives."

All five of Burns' opponents -- Jim Beckman, Mark Pederson, Juan Rangel Jr., Bernie Scheffler and Chris Turner -- criticized the campaign tactic. Some said the survey straddles the line between a legitimate poll and a "push poll" -- a survey that loads questions with potentially negative information about a candidate.

"It seems to me that, so far, Joel has run a pretty slick campaign but hasn't said much about where he stands on the issues," Scheffler said. "It seems unfortunate that he is more interested in painting candidates in a one-dimensional way."

I agree. Joel, let's make this campaign about issues, not labels.

UPDATE, 10.01.07: Joel seems to have too much money on his hands. If you visit www.berniescheffler.com, you'll find that you get pointed to Joel's Web site. Is that really necessary? I'm extremely disappointed in Joel's campaign for moves like this. Unfortunately, that seems to be the tone of his campaign. And there's a whole other month to go. Wee.