Bill Dwight apologized repeatedly, trying to put the story to rest.
But he also pushed it, used it as fodder for his WHMP radio show. Last week, the former Northampton city councilor and longtime ally of Mayor Clare Higgins opened his radio show at least four times with monologues focused on the scandal, sprinkling references to his email screed against Michael Bardsley and his supporters throughout his program.
Dwight's first monologue on the subject aired Sept. 28. On Oct. 2, Dwight issued what he insisted would be his final comment on the matter.
"My bonehead email," he began, "was the central feature" at the previous evening's City Council meeting. "The issue is over or at least it should be. … When I say it should be done I mean its life as an exploitable issue should be played out. … An ill-considered private email from me had insulting language in it and it became public through a variety of means and I have personally and publicly apologized unequivocally and without passive language…. What's left is an emptiness—the absence of substantive discussion of the qualification of our candidates for mayor. The central issue has become instead hurt feelings and the insults that caused them, and so for what it's worth, I'm done apologizing."
The media archive on this latest Northampton imbroglio is bursting at the seams, even without Dwight's contributions. After the story broke Sept. 26 in Daryl LaFleur's Northampton Redoubt blog at valleyadvocate.com, the controversy made the pages of both the Gazette and the Republican and drove debate in on-line forums.
LaFleur's blog contained all the important source documents: the full text of Dwight's email calling Bardsley supporters "angry white guys," "angry yellers," and "teabaggers," which he sent to members of Higgins' re-election team, including Higgins' campaign manager Lisa Baskin, City Councilors Paul Spector and David Narkiewicz and Housing Authority chief Jon Hite; the full text of Bardsley's letter to Higgins complaining about what he called "attempts to demean and degrade my campaign…false accusations [intended] to discourage voters from supporting my mayoral candidacy;" and Higgins' apology, saying, "My volunteers have been asked to keep the discussions civil and I am sure that they will do so."
Dwight, who spoke to me for more than three hours last week about his "mini-story," insists that he never intended his email to "go viral."
That it did, Dwight said, exposes him as a hypocrite, preaching civility in politics from his radio pulpit and using gutter politics and demonizing speech in an email.
He said he intended the email solely to "buck up" the Higgins' team after its defeat in the preliminary election last month. He said he was surprised when Higgins' volunteers leaked it.
Despite his apology, however, Dwight not only kept the story alive but pursued related themes on his show, inviting Baskin, a central figure in this controversy, on-air to remind listeners of the divisive battle over a proposed domestic partnership ordinance in 1995 that was defeated by conservatives in the city. On Monday, Oct. 5, Dwight brought on Rick Feldman, a supporter and one-time opponent of Higgins, to discuss his "qualified endorsement of Higgins," published on northamptonmedia.com. Feldman also wrote about the palpable anger in this election, arguing that Bardsley (the Goliath to Higgins' "David") derives the bulk of his support from conservatives who are still angry about having to give up power in city government in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, even after Higgins' apology, at least one of her supporters continued to push the idea that Bardsley had surrounded himself with conservatives. In a comment to LaFleur's Sept. 26 post written under the pseudonym 13909, Hite asserted that Bardsley was working with Joe Markley, "a campaign consultant who runs the CT Liberty Party, a mission of which is to defeat all the Democrats in CT, and who appeared on the same stage as Cong. Michelle Bachmann." (Bardsley has acknowledged that Markley offered his support in the late spring, but Markley soon left the campaign when it became clear that he and Bardsley had little in common politically.)
The most disingenuous part of Dwight's commentary, and a view echoed by other Higgins supporters, is the idea that the scandal is preempting the discussion of more important, substantive issues. There is, in fact, no evidence of Dwight, Higgins or her campaign trying to raise more substantive issues. Instead, Dwight and other Higgins supporters continue to portray the mayor in vague terms as a better leader and manager—more decisive, more competent, harder-working, more visionary—than Bardsley, reiterating an ad hominem critique of the challenger as a grandstanding opportunist who is now coalescing disparate groups who share nothing but a mutual anger toward the mayor.
