From the Round Table: Candidates deserve darts for trying to hide electronic footprints

It’s disheartening to learn that two candidates for seats on the Columbia City Council left electronic footprints they hoped would never be traced back to them. Both of them should have known better.
In the first case involving Third Ward candidate Gary Kespohl, the surfacing of an old e-mail message during a Chamber of Commerce forum became a running soap opera that started with his flat-out denial of authorship and ended with obfuscation.
The second case of cyber shenanigans is a tiny illustration of how the entire Fourth Estate, particularly the print media, is grappling with its transition into the electronic realm of the Internet and social media such as Twitter.
Fourth Ward candidate Tracy Greever-Rice asked a neighbor who worked for the Columbia Daily Tribune to eliminate messages she posted on the newspaper’s Web site, apparently because they were viewed as harmful to her candidacy.
Voters in the April 6 election will have to weigh Greever-Rice’s campaign against her trio of opponents, but engaging a proxy to strip her posted past hardly supports any arguments for “transparency” or any other reason to support her.
A prolific, though partially aliased, Internet poster, Greever-Rice has already put some business people on high alert, and they wonder what to expect if she lands a position on Columbia’s Council of Seven. Voters should be wary of a candidate who stealthily purges the accumulated corpus of her thoughts and ideas as publicly posted on the Internet with aforethought as to their ultimate consequence. The action strongly violates the trust and confidence we treasure as fundamental qualities of the people we choose to represent us.
The Kespohl cyber diversion is equally discouraging to those who pined for a real skirmish with incumbent Karl Skala. By far the most intense, well-prepared and engaged of Council solons to come along in years, Skala will bag his second term with ease because his challenger blundered so soon out of the starting gate.
Skala’s driven deliberateness grates on some, but that Third Ward seat is his personal Iwo Jima. As an archivist, he always comes prepared to charge up any hill that gets in his way.
Unlike Greever-Rice’s seemingly celestial Internet postings (yes, they are out there somewhere!), Kespohl’s e-mail missive regarding the construction of Landmark Hospital is more definite, traceable and indeed surviving as a printed document. This led up to councilman Skala’s somewhat dramatically deft exhumation and unfurling during a recent Columbia Chamber of Council candidate forum.
One suspects Kespohl was recruited for a reprise run by a segment of the so-called development community that wants to oust Skala because the members don’t like him. At this stage, their efforts appear to have backfired because they failed to fully vet their candidate’s trail of written Internet messages.
A gentle word of advice for candidates: Monitor your sycophants, and regulate them. Unregulated behavior at the same Chamber forum by one participant (an accusation that Skala has a drinking problem) did Kespohl no favor.
Finally, there are more traditional print footprints that have been left by another candidate, and there’s been no mention of it that I’ve detected thus far. Did you know that mayoral aspirant Robert McDavid, M.D., is a published novelist?
On Dec. 4, 2006, Denver publisher Outskirts Press released Dr. McDavid’s 603-page novel, Only Daughters. According to the jacket cover: “Only Daughters is the personal struggle of a young physician as she fights to reestablish her life… A work of medical fiction, Only Daughters follows Dr. Eleanor Rawlings from the moment her husband disappears when he is indicted by a federal grand jury for a massive medical fraud.” The publisher adds, “Reader contribution to Only Daughters … is solicited at OnlyDaughters.com.” Wonder what could be lurking there.