People are canvassing in America’s Vancouver! Stop the presses!

Down here in Vancouver the hotly contested race for mayor is providing the lamest example of conservative victimology I’ve ever seen during a campaign, and that’s quite a low bar to crawl under. If you’ll recall, long-time incumbent Royce Pollard is squaring off against sitting council member and mayoral candidate Tim Leavitt in the race.

Today Leavitt is complaining that people are canvassing (!) and that someone out on the east side, um, didn’t feel comfortable about it. A Columbian article details the non-staggering revelations, including this hilarious tidbit:

Another call came last weekend from a resident of the Fircrest neighborhood, who called to complain of what his wife described as odd behavior by a door-beller.

The wife, who declined to give her name, told The Columbian that the man asked her whether she was a Leavitt supporter. She said yes. “He asked if we’d voted, if we’d gotten our ballots. I said yes. He asked if I’d filled them out and if we needed help filling out the ballots. I said, ‘I think we can handle it.'”

She said the man was not aggressive, but she felt uncomfortable as the conversation continued. “I know enough to know you can call a campaign office and ask for assistance, but people don’t go door to door and offer to fill out your ballot.”

Please excuse me for a moment, I’ve been on the fainting couch for a while now, this kind of outrageous canvassing caused me to reach for the smelling salts.

Notice that the person making the claim won’t even put their name in the local newspaper, which tells you all you need to know.

Lots of people get uncomfortable about people knocking on doors in their neighborhood, often because they are selling cleaning sprays, conservative ideology or some other scam.

What’s even more interesting is that the big money for canvassing appears to be in the form of a third-party expenditure on behalf of Leavitt. According to PDC documents provided by the Pollard campaign, the labor union Unite Here, Local 9, is spending $30,000 on behalf of Leavitt for canvassing and printing expenses. So you kind of wonder why the Leavitt campaign is trying to stir the shit about canvassing, other than as a cover for their “union thugs.” (Snark alert!) That way if any of their people get out of line, they’ve issued a preemptive justification for all the petty sign destruction and other baloney that accompanies campaigns.

And let’s face it, in all campaigns people get all worked up and accuse the other side of stuff, and conservatives seem to do it in rote fashion as standard operating procedure. From national tickets down to the most modest races, conservative are never accountable for their own actions, they’re being wronged by the wrong kind of people! It’s always someone or something–the media, the gays, the black people, the unions, the terrorists, the environmentalists, the people ringing doorbells, whatever. You kind of wonder what happens when a conservative needs car repairs, because it must be exhausting trying to figure out which group to blame for that bad muffler.

It’s all so utterly predictable. This may be a non-partisan race, but Leavitt is running the classic GOP Clark County campaign perfected by folks like Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver. They try to stir up the conservative base through resentment and claims of being wronged, while campaigning as hard as anyone else. Frankly I’m expecting a ginned-up PDC complaint from the Leavitt camp any day now, it’s what Benton always does. It usually drops on a Friday, so that by the time a reporter can reach someone at the PDC, nobody cares and the public sees a headline about some supposedly nefarious action which is promptly forgotten when the election is over.

If people wonder why regular folks get disgusted by politics, it’s partly because of the stupid antics. It’s too bad Leavitt has thrown in with the local BIAW types and will apparently do or say anything to get elected, but then, that’s how the BIAW rolls. For strictly ideological reasons, the people who build houses apparently don’t want a new bridge that would make their customers’ lives better.

At least Pollard is a stand-up individual, even if one doesn’t agree with him on every last thing. It’s fascinating to watch a moderately pro-business mayor be exposed to the same tactics Democrats have to put up with on a routine basis.