December 10, 2010 07:38 AM UTC

2012 Dream Matchup: Mike Merrifield versus Sally Clark for El Paso County Commissioner

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• by: NatalieP

After reading yet another letter yesterday to the Gazette’s editor complaining about what many Republicans and Democrats alike consider the shady term limits language used on the November ballot to give County Commissioners and other county offices three terms instead of two; after hearing Mrs. Clark’s interview weeks ago on the Jeff Crank show defending the wording, my dream matchup is one that pits Mike Merrifield against her in 2012.  

Like a lot of voters, I thought the wording on the ballot was intentionally misleading.  It may be time to retire a Republican through the ultimate term limiting measure, and vote her out and put Mike Merrifield in her seat.  Don’t get me wrong.  There are very few matters on which I would agree with Mike Merrifield.  There a far more on which I would agree with Sally Clark, but there are times when we need to consider whether having someone of an entirely different viewpoint, acting as a cop, isn’t a good idea.  Merrifield has said he’s going to move into her commissioner’s district to run against her.  I hope he does.  He’s going to have to deal with the scandal, though, of his many years of his prior campaigns for house and his recent losing campaign for county commissioner having violated campaign finance laws.  No one caught him in his house races and nothing can be done about that now.  Too much time has passed. He got caught twice on this in his county commissioner race and had to return close to a couple thousand dollars to twenty or so donors.  After getting caught the first time and returning the donations, he got caught again on the same kind of facts. That’s not good. I don’t know if I did it right or not but from what I read in the Independent I did a search and it looks to me like is campaigns actually would have had to have returned more than $20,000 in total to a few hundred donors going back to his first house reelection campaign through to date if his campaigns had been caught and someone had complained.  This is bad for him.  But, it’s not insurmountable.  

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