Aubertine and Renzi's love-hate relationship with the Times

Oh, how I miss the halcyon days of 2006!

Way back then, Rep. John McHugh privately accused one of my reporters of suggesting campaign themes to Democrat challenger Dr. Bob Johnson — warmonger McHugh supports torture of Iraqis! — which Johnson would then use and the reporter would then write about.

It was a damn conspiracy.

At the same time, Johnson privately accused another Times reporter of choosing to write about Johnson's unfulfilled loan obligation to Samaritan Medical Center rather than focusing on McHugh's voting record regarding Iraq. Johnson suggested my reporter was helping ensure there would one day be another memorial wall in Washington, D.C., with the names of 50,000 dead soldiers.

It was another damn conspiracy.

Yup, those were good times indeed. Both candidates hated us, but to their credit they funneled the hate just toward us. They didn't publicly make us a part of their campaigns.

Just compare that to the 2008 elections, better known as the "The Recent Unpleasantness."

The Watertown Daily Times was relentlessly pulled into the campaign strategies of state Sen. Darrel Aubertine and his challenger, Dave Renzi, both of whom used our stories to promote themselves and attack each other in campaign fliers and TV ads.

But don't let the ads fool you. Behind the scenes both sides routinely accused the Times of trying to throw the election to the opposition.

The day after the Times endorsed Renzi, his campaign put out a press release calling the Times "the district's most-read newspaper and one of the oldest, best-respected and most influential newspapers in Upstate New York."

What a nice thing to say!

But the tune was a bit different weeks earlier after we printed stories about Renzi's improper inclusion in the state's pension system. A miffed Renzi stormed into the publisher's office to deliver one of those good old "Pardon My French" speeches. I don't remember him saying much about the Times being best-respected that day.

Aubertine's camp accused us of actually working to elect Renzi because the day after the editorial appeared, it was printed whole cloth in a Renzi ad. Since the editorial appeared on a Saturday and the ad on a Sunday, Aubertine's minions accused us of providing Renzi the editorial prior to publication, figuring — incorrectly — that nobody in our advertising department ever, ever works on the weekend to revise copy for ads purchased long in advance.

Both candidates were intellectually dishonest in using — and not using — Times stories to bolster their own campaigns.

Most of Renzi's accusations about Aubertine improperly hiring his sister, first reported in the Times last spring, were spot on, but Renzi also misled voters by saying that Aubertine stood to make $100,000 off wind turbines proposed to be built on his Cape Vincent property.

While the number was initially suggested by Aubertine himself months earlier in an interview in the Post-Standard, more recent information printed in the Times put the number at $10,000. This correct, but politically less interesting, number was simply ignored in Renzi's ads.

Meanwhile, Aubertine's ads accusing Renzi of stealing money through the state pension system implied Renzi was actually, literally, physically walking the streets of Watertown with stolen lucre in his wallet. The reality? If anybody is going to be cutting a check when the dust settles, it will be the state sending money to Renzi.

(Focus on the aw-shucks smile all you want, but nobody will kick you in the crotch faster than Aubertine. Last winter, when running against Will Barclay, Aubertine produced the campaign's most egregiously false ad regarding fishing rights on the Salmon River. Barclay first and Renzi later asked Aubertine to apologize, but as Aubertine and Butch Cassidy always say, there are no rules in a knife fight.)

If you read the Times regularly, you know the campaign had plenty of strange moments. Aubertine claimed that Gov. David Paterson thought so highly of him that he wanted him to run NYPA. But not only did Paterson deny the job was offered, he added, "I haven't seen him in a long time," which has nothing to do with Paterson being legally blind and everything to do with Aubertine's standing in Albany.

And when Renzi promised to "end the greed on Wall Street," well, where does one even start with such a campaign promise?

Bloggers with their anonymous posters contributed to the daily gurgle of speculation as to what secret, underhanded role the Times was playing in the Aubertine-Renzi campaigns.

But from our vantage point we always come to the same conclusion: as long as they all hate us, we know we're in good shape.

For those who missed our photos of candidates voting, please see above. Jerry Eaton, the Jefferson County GOP elections commissioner, didn't want the media taking photos at polling sites, fearing it would lead to intimidation and lower voting numbers. But we took these photos and published them anyway.

Twelve days later, the Republic still stands.

Bob Gorman is managing editor of the Times.