All Quiet On The D7 Council Race

While District 5 council race heating up with dirty political tricks,  the District 7 council race is eerily quiet and basically stale in comparison.   The front-runner Councilmember Madison Nguyen has not been active with her radio and newspaper ads.  She has more than $65,000 at her disposal.    Nguyen of course has a great name recognition and is confident to win it out rigth in the primary.  Meanwhile Minh Duong is working hard to gather as much vote as he can while dealing with a couple of anynomous dirty hit pieces against him.   The hit pieces have been in the form of mass e-mail to news media, political and business organizations and Internet forum.  The other three candidates are campaigning within their own ethnic group and so far have not outreached to the rest of the community.

With little more than 2 weeks to go, LSI does not expect any last minute uproar in the D7 race considering that the conventional wisdom already predicts Nguyen and Duong would be in the run-off.  If there is a high turn-out ,  the conventional wisdom expects Duong to have a very good chance to close the gap between him and Nguyen. 

Hit Piece Against Magdalena Carrasco

San Jose is a town that tends to be controlled politcally by South Bay Labor Council and those who oppose them would tend to pay the consequences.  The message is loud and clear to District 5 candidate Magdalena Carrasco this week as she is heading toward the home stretch against South Bay Labor Council's candidate Xavier Campos. 

Just a little background, Xavier is the little brother of Nora Campos, the termed-out D5 councilmember.  Of course Nora Campos along with Madison Nguyen are little sisters of Cindy Chavez when it comes to politically pecking order and patronage.  And Cindy Chavez is the head of Labor Council and they both have been known for infamous political hit piece and dirty political tactics.

Vietnamese-American voters in D5  this week received a flyer from what appeared to be from Magdalena Carrasco's campaign.  It was very poorly done both on graphics and contents.  But the main emphasis was a Vietnamese Communist  Flag positioned next to Carrasco.  Representing about 10% of the votes in D5 and in what expects to be a closely contested race, the flyer was clearly designed to hurt Carrasco with the Vietnamese-American voters by associating her with the communist government.  The communist flag is considered to be offensive within the Vietnamese-American community

Thomas Nguyen, a community leader, first took notice of the flyer and alerted the Carrasco's campaign.  Magdalena Carrasco emphatically said that the flyer was not from her campaign.   Whoever it is definitely knew what they were doing and is smart enough not to send the flyer in bulk mail so that it would not be traceable.   They simply put a standard  $0.44 stamp on each flyer.