Down the Coast with Dana Parsons
Politics. If it didn’t make you laugh, you’d have to cry.
So I’m sitting here chuckling after talking to Andrew Do, a guy I happen to like and who is Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen’s chief of staff. He’s also one of nine candidates running for two seats on the Garden Grove City Council.
One of the other candidates is Trung Nguyen, a Garden Grove school board member whose name is mud in the Janet Nguyen camp. It goes back to the two Nguyens ending in a photo finish for the supervisorial seat in February 2007, in which the lady beat the gentleman. And the fact that Trung Nguyen is a favored son of Van Tran, a Little Saigon person of influence who is politically estranged from Janet Nguyen.
On to the current race. Do has taken pains (and probably enjoyed it) to try to puncture the Trung Nguyen balloon. He told me this week that there are “character” issues with Nguyen and, as part of that, cites the 2007 campaign moment in which a doctored photo made it appear as if Nguyen were standing near Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at a political event in Little Saigon.
In a campaign mailer, Do says Nguyen was “caught red-handed doctoring a photo to fool voters.”
The shame. Nguyen apologized for the photo.
As part of his current campaign advertising blast at Nguyen, however, Do displayed the newspaper story about the doctored photo. Under the banner of the Orange County Register the headline read: “O.C. Candidate Has Serious Image Problem.”
Slight problem. The story appeared in The Times, not the Register.
Is it possible that Do attached our story to the Register’s banner because it has a wider reach in Orange County? A bit misleading, perhaps? A doctored mock-up of the story?
No way, Do told me. “I’ve got to talk to my consultant. If that got mixed up, I apologize. The design guy must have gotten it mixed up.”
He said his consultant is in Northern California and probably isn’t hip to which paper has the larger circulation in Orange County.
On behalf of The Times, apology accepted.
