Mystery flier smears Gordon

The real good news is that we got rid of Fred Parady!!! (Yeah right for business & personal reasons) Below is my unanswered letter to him: October 1, 2007 Dear Mr. Parady, I am writing to formally complain about your decision at the Riverton GOP presidential forum on September 29, 2007. At issue are three campaigns that did not meet Wyoming GOP’s requirements for “stage-time” at the event. You went against our party’s rules to allow two campaigns to promote their candidates by speaking or having a video played while willfully excluding the third campaign despite their polite & timely request for fair treatment. I addressed my concerns with you after the event and am not satisfied with the outcome. Attached is a detailed letter describing my concerns. I look forward to a resolution and to many years working with you to promote our party’s values. Detailed description of concerns I am writing regarding your decision last Saturday night at the Riverton GOP presidential forum for Precinct Captains (PC’s). I am not officially affiliated with any campaign, but am a strong supporter of one of the candidates and volunteered my Saturday to drive to Riverton and assist the official campaign staff with their table at CWC. Our campaign was very excited to have the opportunity to have access to share our message with Precinct Captains in person. This opportunity is wonderful for campaigns that are “priced-out” of PC access to due to the $10k price tag for the mailing list. We understood that the forum rules included allowing only candidates in attendance to speak as a part of the program. Our candidate was not able to attend, and we understood and appreciated the decision not to allow representatives to speak. This policy certainly encourages candidates to attend in person when possible. Only three campaigns sent contingencies to Riverton, two of whom also were attended by their candidate. The program began by allowing a candidate that did not come to Riverton or even send staff to have his video-taped speech from Casper shown. While showing this video was not in line with the decision to only allow attending candidates to speak, I appreciated your willingness to bend rules in order to get more “knowledge” to the decision-makers of our communities. You then announced that one of the attending campaigns would be allowed to have a non-candidate representative speak. You said that you allowed this because he had shown up, owned land in Wyoming and paid taxes in Wyoming. While allowing this representative to speak was not in line with the decision to only allow attending candidates to speak, I appreciated your willingness to bend rules in order to get more “knowledge” to the decision-makers of our communities. Because of the video, it was only fair to allow it. While my assumption was that you would invite the one remaining attending campaign to have their representative speak, I immediately asked Ms. A. Larimer if we would also be allowed to have a representative from our campaign speak, even just for a few minutes. We had available to speak several options, including 6 tax-paying Wyoming property owners & full-time residents, a Wyoming Air National Guard soldier & Wyoming college student, 3 Wyoming business owners or an official high-ranking campaign representative. Ms. Larimer agreed to ask you for permission. Soon thereafter Ms. Larimer told us that you would not allow us to have a representative speak. After the event, I approached you in the lobby. I hoped that you would give me good reasoning for our exclusion from presenting in the forum, and I wanted a resolution without a formal complaint having to be filed. Fred, if you had simply forgotten to invite us to speak, my concern would be very different. In this incident however, you were very negligent in allowing equal access. You purposefully & unfairly excluded a Republican presidential candidate from an important Wyoming GOP opportunity without reason. These are not weekly or even monthly forums… this was a “one-shot” opportunity. At no time did you invite campaigns to submit video-taped speeches or publish requirements for “blood” relatives to speak. In Wyoming, even if 99% of the population prefers a particular candidate, their voice is not heard until next fall, which will be too late for all but one Republican candidate. The only people campaigns really need to reach at this stage in the game are PC’s. This was a very important event for all campaigns. I understand that it was a politically-wise decision for the slighted campaign representative not to confront you about this issue and perhaps be completely excluded from future events or friendships with our party in Wyoming. He was clearly disappointed but shrugged it off as, “winning some and losing some.” This is why I am stepping up, as a Wyoming citizen, family man, passionate Republican and Wyoming business & property owner representing only myself and equality. All it takes for bad stuff to happen is for good people to remain silent, and while I don’t know how “good” I am, I am at the very least decent. Whether you like my choice of candidate or not, whether he is in CNN’s top 3 or not, whether you have enough political pull to have decisions of this nature ignored or simply to have an official canned “fake-apology-statement” like, “Our party recognizes that at times some of our split-second decisions might be construed by some as being less than fair, we are dedicated to continually improving our party and its processes….” or not; I am concerned. I am only 34 years old and have not given up on our party or the political machine. So, how should this issue be remedied? I would not expect you to reconvene all the PC’s and pay for my candidate’s representative to return to give a 3-minute speech. If, after careful & objective consideration you agree that you made an improper decision, I would welcome a formal apology and an attempt to repair the harm that was done to my candidate’s campaign. One way to do this would be to provide their campaign with a complimentary PC mailing & phone list. A passionate in-person speech can not be replaced with mailings, but this list would be a low cost way for our state to apologize and would be of high-value to the slighted campaign and would be a positive move toward fairness. Another option would be for you to write a letter to all attending PC’s and apologize for not allowing all attending campaigns to speak at the Riverton event and ask that they include the slighted candidate in their research for their person to support. Fred, as with most Wyoming folks, I appreciate your warm handshake and smile as well as the work you do for our party. When I first met you some time ago at a Lincoln County GOP cocktail party, I liked you immediately and looked forward to assisting you as you requested. I invited you to join me at Jackson Rotary luncheon for more exposure. I like you Fred, but am very disappointed in this situation. I look forward to a real solution and to many years of helping you and our party work toward lower taxes, smaller government and our other mutual political beliefs.
Shepard