Thanks to the customary incompetence of Cox Cable, the Oscar Gutierrez campaign delivered a mailer to Westside voters on Wednesday that spells the city council candidate’s name wrong.
In really big letters.
“It is totally on me," campaign manager Mary Rose said of the just-landed mailer.
On its front, the piece identifies her guy as “Oscar Cutierrez” instead of, you know…
“I told Oscar to throw me under the bus,” Mary added, saying that the screw-up occurred because she was forced to do her normally impeccable proofreading on her phone instead of her computer.
“Because – once again – my Cox internet was out,” she growled, fingering everybody's favorite local monopoly. J'accuse!
It was Newsmaker’s, um, sad duty to break the news to Oscar. When we reached him, he was scurrying out the door to video record the MIT Enterprise Forum at the Santa Barbara Women’s Club, an assignment from his day job as a TV Santa Barbara producer.
“Oh my God, are you *#@*in’ kidding me?!?,” he replied. "#*@#!"
Newsmakers, your favorite family-friendly local politics blog.
State of play. Oscar is considered the front-runner in the four-way special election in District 3, based on absolutely no data at all. However, he is armed with the endorsement of the Democratic County Central Committee, which among other things, puts him on slate cards with big-name Dems for federal, legislative and statewide offices; also we bet the veteran operative Rose has a better idea of where his votes are than the rest of the field does theirs.
Thanks to the support of Mayor Cathy Murillo (which has included a $5K check) he also has more money than any of his three rivals, all of which gives him an apparent advantage in organization over foes Elizabeth Hunter, Ken Rivas and Michael Vidal.
Except for that whole spelling thing.
Ever the optimist, Rose found a possible silver lining in the embarrassing episode:
"You could say it is a clever political ploy to get the media to write about it, so that people will 'look for the typo'" she told us. "And that means they actually read the mail."
Talk about name recognition.
Images: Dominant image from new mailer from Oscar Gutierrez campaign; Oscar at the recent SB Independent forum.