Burnt Orange Report

I don't see this as a very big deal. I've been to dozens of events before where a candidate had another person stand in for them. There are hundreds of events in the weeks before an election, and no candidate can possibly attend every event, and it's usually good to send someone that you know and trust to be your stand-in if you won't be at an event. Considering that Julian Castro's twin brother probably knows him better than just about anyone else, I can hardly fault him for his choice. Unless there was a deliberate attempt to deceive people, then i don't see what the deal is.

Jim, Byron:

I've been to quite a few events where they have both showed up in the past four years, and I can honestly tell you that it's very hard to tell them apart.

Joaquin was on a barge with a big sign on the sides titled, "San Antonio City Council Members." Julian was at a District 7 forum. To the 250,000 people watching in person, and the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people watching at home- who don't pay attention to politics nearly as much as we do- if there was one Castro on the barge, they would expect it to be Julian. The announcers believed it to be Julian. Whether or not it was deliberate is really a judgement call.

I think this was extremely poor judgement on their part. These are two extremely smart guys who know that to the average person it's almost like looking into a mirror. Wouldn't you err on the side of caution on something like this?

If this incident was standing on its own, it wouldn't be a problem at all. But in the last week to ten days, Julian has turned in a campaign finance report that did not account for $40k in contributions (almost 1/4 of his entire contributions for the quarter) and failed to report specific expenditures (ie, out of town travel), and has been seen as the person leading the charge to not support the council candidate for city manager.

In addition to not accounting for a chunk of money, Julian had made a minimum of one mistake on about 140 pages of the 170 page finance report. These ran from not putting an address, not putting a name, not putting the amount contributed, or accepting more than the allowed amount from a contributor.

And while the vast majority of San Antonio did not approve of the city manager deal, I would say the city is pretty split over how the deal was terminated- with Julian calling a press conference hours before the vote, stating that he would not support the deal. Even though not once during the negotiations had he come out and told anyone that the salary and benefits were too high.

It just seems to me that ever since people have really started to focus on the race, Castro has stumbled all over himself. Will this make any difference at all to the voters, or does this just matter to people like me, I don't know right now.

But I do know one thing, with less than three weeks remaining, you'd rather be cruising than having to call press conference after press conference defending your campaign on a variety of issues.

One final thing.

Trust is a huge issue in San Antonio. In the past 5 years or so, we've had 3 City Councilmen convicted on Bribery/Fraud charges, a current city councilman who has had numerous police calls to his home because of domestic disturbance/assault complaints and who was investigated by the police dept. for possibly stealing jewelry confiscated by the police and attempting to resell it at his own jewelry store, and another current city councilman who has been accused or rigging federal gov't contracts in his favor (although this charge is easily the weakest one).

In addition, the city council has been seen as completely unresponsive to the average voter/citizen.

The electorate is really, really tired (moreso than the average American voter) of hearing about any sort of fraud, deception, ineptitude coming from city hall. Even if it's something as small as which twin was where.