Politics Eyman & Co. to Media: “Feel like you’ve been duped this morning — well, you have.”
Last week, Tim Eyman told every reporter on his email list that he would be in Olympia today at 11 a.m., “bringing down petitions” to the Secretary of State’s office. The implication was clear: Eyman had enough signatures for his anti-gay referendum, R-65, and would be turning them in today, one day before the Tuesday deadline. Well, it turns out today’s press event was a total ruse — and if you want to see reporters get mad, try luring them all the way down to Olympia for a phony event, and then mocking them to their faces.
Eyman, dressed in a Darth Vader outfit to emphasize how little he cares about being perceived as some sort of “dark lord,” walked a small batch of signed R-65 petitions past the desks at the Secretary of State’s office and then turned around and walked right back out of the office, still holding the signed petitions. There were maybe 30 petitions, containing about 20 signatures each, which means Eyman showed up today with about 600 signatures in favor of R-65, nowhere near the 112,000 he needs.
The inescapable conclusion: He doesn’t have the signatures, and he was using today’s press event in a last ditch effort to get free press, through which he might encourage more people to sign R-65 petitions before tomorrow’s deadline. One of his cohorts said as much, telling the assembled reporters:
“Feel like you’ve been duped this morning — well, you have.”
The reporters weren’t having it. When Eyman tried to use his camera time to stump for R-65 and a car tabs initiative he’s pushing this year, a radio reporter cut him off, telling Eyman that the media wasn’t there to air a commercial for him. A print reporter asked Eyman if he was even capable of running a successful referendum campaign without misleading people (as Eyman’s been doing with R-65), and without misleading the press. Eyman didn’t have a good answer for that one, except to say that he doesn’t care what reporters think of him, as long as they write about him.
“There’s no such thing as bad press, that’s the reality,” he said.
There were boxes of petitions that Eyman had brought to the event with him, and I asked one of the Eyman supporters to open up the sealed boxes. Turns out the boxes weren’t holding R-65 petitions, they were holding petitions for Eyman’s car tabs initiative — petitions that weren’t even due this week.
“You have to be accountable in politics,” Eyman was saying.
I asked him if this event was an example of running an accountable political campaign, given that one day before the R-65 signatures are due he can’t even tell us how many signatures he has. Again, Eyman dodged: “If we were at all concerned about being well-liked and respected…”
Bottom line: This was one of the most unprincipled press conferences I’ve ever seen, and my sense is that the reporters whose time was wasted this morning are furious. I hesitate to even write about it, given Eyman’s “no such thing as bad press” mantra, but I do think it’s important to give a sense of how dishonest he’s willing to be in order to get a camera in front of himself. It will be interesting to see how the dailies and the television stations handle this stunt — if they give it any attention at all.
Fuck, this guy has been irrelevant since he was outted as an embezzler back in 2002. It's about time the press awakened to this fact.