So here’s my question for Betsy Butler. At what point did you decide you were running against me, Marta Evry, a part-time blogger, and not the three other candidates whose names will appear on the June 5th primary ballot for the 50th Assembly District race?

Let’s start with this post written by one of your surrogates which begins with this:

The 50th Assembly District was treated to a display of bullying last week: One of the candidates running against Betsy Butler’s bid for the new district launched a prolonged attack against her campaign promotion.

Does the author link to candidate Torie Osborn’s website? Or to the LA Weekly article about the 8,000 plastic baby bottles you dumped on district voters, an article which quotes candidate Richard Bloom as saying your team “is ‘milking’ her BPA legislation for all its worth.”?

No, instead she links to an article I wrote about the environmental concerns raised by district voters regarding those 8,000 foreign-made plastic baby bottles.

Also, imagine my surprise when I heard my name mentioned in the KCAL-TV follow up to the same baby bottle story. Why? Because the “reporter” for the story never bothered to contact me. But he was more than happy to take your word for it that a part-time blogger was somehow able to bully (there’s that word again) a sitting Assembly member with a war chest of half a million dollars.

Girlfriend, we need to talk.

This may be news to you, but this race isn’t about me. And it’s not about you. It’s about the people of the 50th Assembly District, the people of California, and how we have to solve the awful, intractable problems that decades of political dysfunction, indeed malpractice, has brought to this state.

I have nothing personal against you, Betsy. I supported you in 2010 when you ran against Tea Party candidate Nathan Mintz (for anyone who’s keeping score, I live in Betsy’s current district) and I was grateful for your support of Debra Bowen in the Bowen/Hahn race last year.

But for a whole host of reasons I believe you made a poor choice in abandoning your current district to run in AD50.

Mainly because:

A) In choosing to leave my district vulnerable to Republican takeover to run in another district where the registration advantage is so great, a democratic corpse could get elected, you’ve made it that much harder for the Assembly to reach the 2/3rds majority needed to break Republican obstruction in Sacramento.

B) You seem to have forgotten that voters like to make informed choices about who will represent them in Sacramento.

For better or worse, I find myself to be the only person writing about this campaign in a consistent and substantive way. Do I have a point of view? Absolutely. It is all out there on public display. But I think it also means I have to work twice as hard to make sure everything I write is accurate, sourced and backed up by the facts. Voters are already ill-served in this state by a news media unwilling to do even the most basic legwork to inform the public, and by politicians willing to exploit that weakness to their own advantage. I shouldn’t be adding to the problem.

So this isn’t complicated, Betsy. If you want me to stop writing “negative” (i.e.: accurate) posts about your campaign, then stop doing things like this:

• Dismissing as “insignificant” a petition signed by hundreds of high-value core volunteers in your current South Bay district pledging to fundraise and organize against potential Tea Party opponents if you remained in the district. Instead, you abandoned your current constituents in the South Bay because you believed the democratic voter advantage in the new AD50 would make it easier for you to get elected.
• Accepting nearly $150K in donations from fellow Sacramento Assemblymembers while not donating one thin dime to the Democratic candidate who stepped up in the district you abandoned, even though that candidate is running against two well-funded Tea Party candidates – one of them a millionaire who ran a $750K self-funded congressional race against Janice Hahn.
• Intentionally misleading voters by calling yourself the district’s “incumbent” even though your current district barely overlaps the new AD50 by 1 percent and you’ve never lived or worked within its boundaries. Or worse, claiming that Marina del Rey (where you own a condo) is actually part of AD50, which is what you told KCAL-TV “reporter” Dave Bryan, who dutifully reported that falsehood as fact.
• Thoughtlessly opening a campaign office outside the boundaries of AD50, then erasing the evidence, hoping nobody would notice.
• Calling yourself the “environmental” candidate while at the same time dumping at least 8,000 (and maybe as many as 30,000) unwanted plastic baby bottles on district voters.
• Highlighting your union endorsements while using union PAC money to buy those plastic baby bottles, bottles which you admitted were made in non-union factories based in Mexico, a country where the minimum wage is less than $5 a day.
• Touting an endorsement from AAGLA, a landlord lobbying organization which openly brags on their website that they and their past president, Howard Jarvis, were instrumental in passing Proposition 13 and Costa-Hawkins (a so-called “vacancy decontrol” law which made it impossible for cities to keep rent control restrictions in place on an apartment once it was vacated) and which calls rent control “socialized housing” that has spread across California like a “disease”.

So let me conclude with this – each of the four candidates running in the 50th Assembly District race bring unique strengths and weaknesses to the contest, but it does voters a huge disservice when you try to obfuscate your resume through the kinds of tactics you’ve chosen to pursue. So if you want to debate what I’ve written on policy grounds, I’m more than ready to have that conversation. I think that’s exactly what voters are hungry for, and what they deserve.

However, if you and your surrogates insist on playing the victim by equating me to multi-billion dollar oil and tobacco interests, good luck with that.

Because if you think a part-time blogger can bully you, how are voters supposed to believe you’ll stand up to the actual bullies, the lobbyists and special interests in Sacramento who come knocking on your office door Every. Single. Day?