A cautionary tale and a blogger's confession

I removed a name this morning from the list of hosts I initially included in yesterday's post about Judge Clare Joyce Quish's August 9 fundraiser. I admit my share of fault in this: When I got the information for the post from the campaign, I found I could copy and paste the host list without retyping each name, and I did. That meant I just glanced at the list, long enough to notice that this was a list of very prominent people, but not long enough to notice that a sitting judge was listed as one of the hosts.

My readers are more alert than I was. Soon after the post went up, I received a comment along the lines of 'I didn't know So-and-So had retired, but he must have, else why is his name attached to this fundraiser?' I didn't run the comment because it also took a gratuitous, or at least unnecessary, swipe against someone else -- but I am, as always, grateful to the author of the comment for alerting me.

I immediately reached out to the Quish campaign about this and, this morning, word has filtered back: The inclusion of the judge's name in the list was a mistake.

As my kids might have said during their teenage years, no duh.

Still, I'm not here to embarrass anyone. On the other hand, there's no sense in merely editing out the name and pretending it didn't happen; my blog had over 1,000 page views yesterday. And my information was taken from a flyer that had presumably been sent already to prospective donors. It had been seen.

So I offer this episode as a cautionary tale to campaigns going forward: Don't place too much responsibility in the hands of a campaign consultant or fundraiser who may not understand the limitations that the Code of Judicial Conduct puts on judicial campaigns. Have someone with judicial campaign experience look at fundraising invites before they get out into the great wide world.