Sue Peters, an activist parent running for the local school board in Seattle, has been targeted for defeat by some of the wealthiest people in Seattle. She has raised $31,000. She has been a public school parent for 10 years.
Her opponent has raised over $100,00. In addition, some of the wealthiest people in the state created a PAC and added another $100,000 to the campaign chest of Sue’s opponent.
$200,000 vs. $31,000. Can this seat be bought?
Recently, the PAC released a flyer criticizing Sue Peters as a”conspiracy theorist” for pointing out the obvious: The “billionaire boys club” wants to make sure she is not elected to the Seattle school board. What a coincidence: Not a single contributor to the PAC to beat Sue Peters has a child in the Seattle public schools.
PAC contributors include:
Matt Griffin – real estate developer with no children in Seattle Public Schools $30,000
Christopher Larson – businessman and co-owner of Seattle Mariners baseball team, with no children in Seattle Public Schools $30,000
DFER (Democrats for Education Reform) – Corp ed reform political lobbying enterprise $10,000
Nicholas Hanauer – Venture capitalist with no children in Seattle Public Schools $20,000
CASE (Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy), the PAC of the local Chamber of Commerce $7,750
PAC is currently at $103,550
Top contributors to the anti-Peters campaign fund include:
Steve and Connie Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft Corp.) $1800 each (maximum allowed)
Jeff and Patricia Raikes (CEO of Gates Foundation) $900 each
William Gates, Sr. (father of Bill) $900
CASE, the PAC of the local Chamber of Commerce $900
Matt Griffin & Evelyne Rozner real estate developer with no children in Seattle Public Schools $1800 each (max allowed)
Nicholas and Leslie Hanauer, Venture capitalist with no children in Seattle Public Schools $900 each
Christopher Larson, businessman and co-owner of Seattle Mariners baseball team, with no children in Seattle Public Schools $1800 (max)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And remember this is an unpaid position in Seattle…
Oh it’s a paid position if the billionaire boys back you!
Diane, I’ve lived in Seattle since the late 70’s and I’ve never seen a more vile and egregious “Campaign Hit Piece” than the one that Suzanne Estey’s people sent out roughly 48 hours ago against Sue Peters.
Although I’ve always been a strong supporter of Sue Peters, I’ve met with, and spoken to Suzanne Estey on several occasions. And despite some nuanced disagreements with ideas and approaches, found her to be a decent and respectable person.
With the issuance of this—the third straight, slanderous and mendacious “Hit Piece”—I no longer have any respect for Estey as a candidate, or as a person. And her dubious claims of deniability—“I don’t know anything about any of these mailings and to criticize them would be denying people their first amendment rights” is what she recently told the Seattle Times!—just aren’t credible.
Seattle isn’t New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, at least not yet. It is, relatively speaking, a Big Small Town. Most politically involved citizens know each other, at least casually, and its specious for Estey to claim that she has no knowledge, involvement or connection to the producers of this truly scurrilous attack mailer.
However, the very fact that Estey’s people felt that they had to print and mail this attack piece demonstrates how close this race truly is: Estey has—as of last night—11 times as much money as Sue Peters.
Eleven times as much? And they STILL feel they need to resort to this type of mud slinging and gutter politics?
I have always thought of this type of thing—a last minute hit piece trying to discredit a candidate by attacking them personally—as a desperation tactic. A “Hail Mary” pass, if you will, hoping for some kind of last minute miracle, despite the overwhelming odds against you.
But normally, it’s the poor campaign, the vastly outspent campaign, that is way behind in the polls that has to resort to this shameful, contemptuous behavior. This is the first time I’ve seen the campaign with all the resources and advantages crawl this low.
I hope their tactic doesn’t work; the mailer is so crude, so juvenile in its design, language and execution, that it backfires and has the opposite effect from the intended one.
Suzanne Estey claims that one of her great skills is bringing people together and that, if elected, she’ll somehow unify the various factions on the Seattle school board and make them mutually trusting and effective.
If this is Estey’s idea of “bringing people together”, I shudder to think what she’ll be like once she has a little power to yield. I fear for our children, our schools and our families.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/31/new-jersey-schools-disrepair_n_4178348.html
Watch it, Seattle. This is how public school kids fare under “reform”. Second class citizens.
I fear that the answer is yes, big money will buy this race.
We in Seattle just got a second mailer from Dale-Etsey’s wealthy, send-their-own-kids-to-private-schools PAC today. Another hit piece that shows a cartoon that Peters had on her blog that was Harry Potter-ish — showing Gates and other “venture philanthropists” as dementors who are the kiss of death to public ed. The mailer starts with “EVIL DOERS” in bold at the top and without reading closely, it looks like this is a characterization of Peters herself. Then it goes on to say, “We need a school board member who can work with people…not INSULT THEM.” I worked with Dale-Etsey in the past and she seemed like a good person then, but she’s lost my respect for how poorly she has responded to these and other really base tactics by her supporters.
But I’m not just voting against Dale-Etsey, but for Peters. She has more experience in Seattle Public Schools and, I think, will also show some spine against poor SPS district policy and practice. Additionally, she’s already done great work on our failing math curriculum and that is important to me.
Our local education blogger, Melissa Westbrook, recently turned up some concerning history regarding inaccuracies in Dale-Etsey’s resume and stump speech claims:
http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2013/10/suzanne-dale-estey-embellishment-is-her.html
It’s all really revolting. I mean, that kind of $$ for a school board race?! Call me suspicious.
What the people who produced this egregious “Hit Piece” are betting is that the average voter is not plugged in to the intricate world of “ed reform” related issues. And it’s true.
Even my smartest and most well-educated friends admit they know virtually nothing about the school board and K-12 issues generally, and are particularly uninformed when it comes to the seemingly arcane “ed reform” galaxy.
So, if that’s true for your most cerebral and sophisticated voters, it’s certainly going to be true for your average voter, thus their thinking goes.
However, the people who produced the Hit Piece against Sue may have overlooked something important. This could blow up in their faces.
What every voter CAN understand is “A last minute Hit Piece”, “character assassination”, “drive by slander”, “taking things out of context and making untrue claims”, “using a word Sue Peters never once used to try and make her look like some sort of nut, just before voters go to the polls”, “all paid for by three guys who have never had any children in any public school system.”
People can understand “committing an outrageous foul, and hitting below the belt, and hoping that by the time the public learns the whole story, the clock will have already run out—Game Over! We win—you lose! Ha Ha!”
Why do you think they did this now, instead of last week, or last month? They knew that this coming weekend was when most people would be filling out their ballots, and that Sue Peters and her supporters wouldn’t have the time or the money to explain their side of the story.
They’re hoping to play the voters for fools, betting that this slanderous hit piece, based on a shameful lie, sent just before the election, will be enough to hoodwink the voters into voting against Sue Peters.
And by doing it through this instantly created, spur-of-the-moment PAC, they’re hoping it will provide Suzanne Estey with ‘plausible deniability’, hoping it gives her with the cover she needs to claim she “doesn’t know anything about it.”
People get smears. And they don’t like them. The average voter couldn’t begin to tell you anything about Wendy Koop or Michelle Rhee except that they both are women, but they do understand unfair attacks, smears, slanders and character assassination.
The Estey people are also well aware of the BACKLASH that can result from this; they’re evil but they’re savvy. They know that if they attempted to make this the “line” or “meme” against Sue Peters, a month ago, or even just a week ago, it would probably backfire and make Estey and her “independent” (or adjunct) campaign look small, vicious, mendacious and untrustworthy.
That’s the reason why we saw this attack piece just NOW, and not a week or two earlier. They’re know how little money Sue Peters has and so they’re just cynically betting that she will never be able to get her response out in front of the same number of voters, before they complete their ballot.
Last minute acts of sabotage—and that’s clearly what this is—is something everyone over the age of six understands. It’s unfair. It’s corrupt and it says something about the essential character of Suzanne Estey and the people she’ll be listening to if she were to be elected.
You can help us fight back against this sleazy, last minute attempt at character assassination by contributing to Sue Peters at: http://www.suepetersmoneyrocket.com OR
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=C7STv-cTFufdq-2ZHesAExfJyjdbpjpPNhus5mHTAQeMQnAyxiKn_Ce_rAK&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f8e263663d3faee8def8934b92a630e40b7fef61ab7e9fe63
Also, our blog, Seattle Schools Community Forum, did an investigation of Dale Estey’s resume. (She has a great resume.) We did this because she had this odd tendency to embellish. Turns out she did a LOT of embellishing. Work for our then-Washington State governor was amped up to say she ran his office AND was an analyst AND represented him at meetings. Turns out she was a three-month intern.
She also said she was on many “committees and taskforces” on education issues in our area. We got public disclosure document that show she wasn’t.
If she has a great resume and STILL feels the need to pump herself up, what will she do if elected? Sue Peters is the real choice.
Let us hope not
but
too often we have the best government money can buy. In Wisconsin that seemed to be the way things worked out.
As has been said so many times, Hitler is not the only person who knows that if you yell a lie long enough and loud enough it will be believed.
Sadly the people who have money have a long history of swaying people’s minds. It is called advertising and it works if enough money is spent. Cigarettes is the prime example. A killer but who cares, it made money.
http://www.plunderbund.com/2013/11/01/gop-linked-group-running-ads-in-cincinnati-school-board-race/
There’s only two candidates in the Cincinnati school board race who are receiving big donations from corporate donors and one of them is… (surprise, surprise) the TFA recruiter who is running:
“a group with Republican ties named the Brighter Future Fund has raised nearly eighty thousand dollars from traditionally Republican donors in the Cincinnati area. It is now spending the bulk of that money on television ads for two of the candidates, and on small campaign contributions for some others.
According to FCC filings, the group appears to be organized and operated by Kathryn T. Metz, a former campaign and congressional office staffer for Republican Congressman Steve Chabot. According to Ohio Secretary of State records, Metz also appears to have been a fundraiser for Republican Mike Wilson, the founder of the Cincinnati Tea Party who twice ran unsuccessfully against State Rep Connie Pillich.
Campaign finance reports for the Bright Future Fund list Metz as the group’s treasurer. The address associated with the fund, 632 Vine Street in Cincinnati, is also the address of Metz’s employer, the Fountain Square Group, a political consulting and fundraising company. Metz is the company’s director of fundraising.
Campaign finance reports for the Bright Future Fund show it received $78,850 in contributions from 57 individuals and groups, including some of the biggest Republican donors in Cincinnati.”
Horrible. I really hope she wins. I wish there was something I could personally do to support her, I don’t even know anyone in Seattle to spread the word to.
Hi Jen B,
There IS something you can do: Make a contribution to Sue Peters and help elect her to the Seattle School Board. For every dollar we collect—no amount is too small, we assure you—we can turn it around ASAP in the form of more online advertising on sites where we are most likely to find undecided voters.
So, please help us fight back against this sleazy, last minute attempt at character assassination by contributing to Sue Peters at: http://www.suepetersmoneyrocket.com. (Once you arrive there, please click on any of the conspicuous “Donate” links and you’ll immediately be brought to the page that can accept several forms of donations.)
Thanks for your time and your interest. And PLEASE spread the word to others you know; regardless of where we live, we’re fighting the same “war”, on different battlefields.
Did it. 🙂
Thank you, Jen, so very, very much!
If automated calls to voters are legal in Washington State, that’s a quick way to
get message to voters to counter whatever damage the attacks have caused. Last
minute attacks are often effective because they are not answered.
My guess is that if voters know this attack is coming from 11 wealthy contributors who do not enroll their own children in public schools but who support profit-taking at the expense of public school children’s instruction, they’ll want to put students before profits and elect the right candidate.
Thanks, Nancy, for a very good suggestion. I think several ways of responding—that don’t require a handful of billionaires, doing an “end run” around the law—will be considered.
The truth on this—and the smear tactics of the opposition—has to be told.
It’s unfortunate that honest, caring people who want to do their civic duty are treated like scum. It certainly explains our Congress. Watching them on c-span, it is easy to see that many of them are idiots. Where are our brightest and best?
The school board can make or break a district. It really needs strong, independent members willing to buck the system. And it needs more than one of them to effectively speak out for the children.
Here are my prayers that each of your districts elect the person who will put children first (instead of their egos).
I’ve been adding these lines to emails to my friends and neighbors. By the way, as per school board elections–here’s a plug for Sue Peters, and a big question from one of my heroines–Diana Ravitch. https://dianeravitch.net/2013/10/21/seattle-school-board-race-dominated-by-more-than-200000-from-wealthy-few/#comments. I’ve also been speaking to friends and acquaintances about these issues. Most people are not particularly aware or just believe what they read or hear in mainstream media. Repeatedly my friends have been grateful for the information and have promised to tell their husbands as well.
I hope it will help.
If I could finish… all I can say is wow. From an outsiders point of view… first GO SUE… and second WTF! I think the world of my American friends… and by extension 95% of Americans but your politicians are letting you down badly!
Sue Peters opponent- Suzanne Dale Estey- has run the most toxic campaign in the history of Seattle.
Sue Peter’s opponent runs a “clean” campaign and uses her PAC to smear Peters. Peters opponent runs a campaign that is funded with nearly a quarter of a million dollars in campaign and PAC dollars. The PAC has sent out FOUR mailers against Peters.
Quite a legacy.
I love Seattle! SUE PETERS won! Take that, big money sending your kids to private schools “reformers”!
SPSmama