Tom Perriello showed up at a rally organized by a member of a local Democratic Socialists of America chapter this week, but for some reason, didn’t want to be photographed against a backdrop of DSA members.
This is an awful look on our golden boy.
Daily Progress reporter Eli Lerdau was on the scene on Tuesday for the rally in support of mail-in voting and U.S. Postal Service funding, which Lerdau reported was organized by Emily Yen, a member of the Charlottesville DSA chapter and the former co-chair of DSA for USPS, a campaign of the national DSA that advocated for postal workers during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House.
The rally drew a decent turnout – Lerdau estimated two dozen people were on hand, about half of which were identified as local DSA members.
After the speechifying was done, reporters, including TV crews, gathered around Perriello, who is running for the Democratic Party congressional nomination in the Fifth District, as is custom at these kinds of things.
Lerdau wrote, as this part of the event was coming together, that “campaign staff began to request all cameras be redirected away from the DSA members behind Perriello, citing issues with lighting,” and “also asked the press not to publish any photos or videos of Perriello with DSA members.”
Awkward.
I admire Lerdau, a summer intern who is a second-year student at Vassar College, for breaking the fourth wall here.
And he was basically the only one to do so – his report noted that neither CBS19 nor Cville Right Now mentioned the presence of DSA members at the rally, and NBC29 had video of Perriello with DSA members in the picture, but did not make any reference to who they were.
Needless to say, it’s not our job as media members to do PR work for candidates.
There’s going to need to be some work done by the Perriello crew to get this right, and I’m not thinking about repairing relationships with the local media there.
The media folks who did as asked have work to do on their own to repair their reputations with their readers and viewers.
For the Perriello team, Tom is going to need every vote he can get, in addition to the unbridled enthusiasm of local Dems, from across the spectrum, to pull another upset in the Fifth.
Run off those who want to support you at your own peril, basically.
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Chris Graham
