By Cacy Duncan

   In the four months since both State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas and Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard C. Parks failed to secure the majority vote in the June election for the 2nd supervisoral district seat, the race has gone from civil to fierce as allegations concerning the financing of both campaigns fly back and forth.        Standard political sparring turned ugly following the August announcement that Tyrone Freeman, president of the L.A. chapter of the Service Employees International Union, would be taking a leave of absence due to an investigation into his alleged misappropriation of union funds. With that Parks cried foul, calling for the state senator to return the $4.4-million the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor—which represents over 350 unions—spent to further Ridley-Thomas’ bid for the seat.
    Weeks later, Ridley-Thomas’ camp fired back with an accusation of their own. In a letter to the L.A. district attorney, a Ridley-Thomas aide alleged that Parks’ campaign and an independent expenditure committee improperly conducted business in what a campaign consultant for Ridley-Thomas likened to “an illegal loan from a close associate,” according to the LA Times.
    Said Bernard Parks Jr., Councilman Park’s chief of staff, “Three straight weeks on three straight Fridays he’s released a different bogus attack to deflect from his current link to Tyrone Freeman who basically funded his campaign in the primary and is currently being investigated.”
    Ridley-Thomas declined to respond to emails or phone calls from L.A. Focus.
    For most it’s no surprise that the race has gotten so intense, some going as far as to characterize the candidates as fighting dirty.
“Now that he's fifteen points behind, Parks has to crank up the negative rhetoric,” political analyst Anthony Samad points out. “Ridley-Thomas has to defend himself by correcting the record and pointing some of Parks’ negatives. It's the only way he can keep his lead. Eventually, you knew it had to get to this and the gloves had to come off. It's politics, for Christ sakes.”
Coming out of the starting block, Parks —by virtue of his name identification—had a 44 percent to 32 percent lead over his opponent, according to the Oakland-based opinion research firm, Fairbank, Masin, Maullin  & Associates.
However, an endorsement from L.A.’s powerful Federation of Labor—representing more than 800,000 workers and spending upwards of $4-million dollars to promote their candidate of choice— closed the distance for Ridley-Thomas by the time of the June 4 elections when the Democratic senator took the lead over the former police chief 45% to 40%.
“What I’ve seen I wouldn’t consider dirty. They might be raising what may seem to be over the top issues but you can’t consider that fighting dirty. When you’re behind in funding and financing, that’s what you do,” says political consultant Jewett Walker, who adds, “When labor jumps in, it’s like goliath being in the ring.”
    “Parks is manufacturing lies against Mark Ridley-Thomas through half-truths, or by simple "guilt by association" ties,” says Samad who calls the tone of the current leg of this race dirty. “Dirty is when you manipulate facts, cast aspersions that distort the truth in order to mislead voters into making a decision they may have otherwise might not made.”
Yet, Parks Jr. asserts, “All we’ve done is point out what already was reported. “Me just restating it is not an attack.”
Kerman Maddox, political commentator, calls it aggressive campaigning.
“A lot of people are saying it’s dirty. Dirty to me is when it’s really personal and they actually say a lot of things about the individual on a personal level,” Maddox explains. “Here it’s just an aggressive comparison about the contributors and their records and things like that.”
With the 2nd District seat on the most powerful board in Southern California up for grabs there’s a lot at stake on November 4, namely overseeing L.A. county’s critical government services and a $22 billion budget larger than a majority of the states in the nation.
“With just 42 days left, the stakes are higher, so you expect that the campaign between the two of them is going to be much more aggressive between now and election day,” says Maddox. “And if you think it’s aggressive now, wait until the final ten days.”