Dear Councilor Connolly,
When I arrived home (__ ___ Street, Brighton) at 6:15 this evening, I found a “Connolly for Boston” campaign sign secured to my porch railing with zip ties:
My wife tells me it was not there when she arrived home at 5:15. My three-year-old son tells me he saw “a man in a pickup truck” put up the sign.
Neither my wife nor I has spoken to anyone from your campaign or approved the placement of this campaign sign on our property.
Please explain yourself.
Furthermore, please remove this sign from our property immediately.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Kamens
CC: UniversalHub.com
CC: allstonbrighton2006@googlegroups.com
CC: blog.kamens.us
CC: Boston Globe
CC: Boston Herald
CC: Allston-Brighton TAB
UPDATE: I received a response from John Connolly shortly after sending the email above:
Jonathan,
I don’t know why the sign was put up. In putting up 500+ signs across the city, I am guessing it is possible we had the wrong address or confused it with a list from two years ago or maybe someone e-mailed us the address and we didn’t properly confirm it. Just last week we put up a sign at a home where the owner of 20+ years had told us to put up a sign anytime we want without asking during only to find out the owner had since moved. I had it removed right away. I don’t know why the sign is up at your home, but I will try to find out when I next talk to my campaign manager. The only thing I do know right now is that we made a mistake, and for that, I apologize.
I’m confused as to why you copied media on the e-mail, but I’ll publicly acknowledge I made a mistake if that is what you want me to do or you can just forward my e-mail to whomever you wish.
In any event, the sign will come down tomorrow. In fact, I’ll be in Brighton tomorrow morning so I will do it myself.
I apologize for the inconvenience, and I hope you are well.
Apologies,
John
For the record, I believe we did allow him to put up a sign on our lawn for one of his previous elections, so that would explain why he’d think he could get away with putting one up without permission this time around, but I frankly don’t buy his claim that his campaign “confused” its lists; it seems rather likely to me that any such “confusion” was intentional. I sent Connolly this response:
I copied the media because I think it is a newsworthy event when a candidate trespasses on a resident’s property to further his campaign. If it was an accident, then that reduces the severity of the offense but certainly does not fully mitigate it.
And I haven’t forgotten, frankly, what you did to Steve Murphy. Your hands are not entirely clean of campaign hijinks.
Jonathan Kamens
The reference in the last paragraph above is to an incident in 2007 when Connolly sent out an anonymous campaign postcard attacking Steve Murphy. You can Google for more information. Here is how the Globe reported it.
