Rookie candidate Emanuel Pleitez was written off early in his unsuccessful race for the 32nd Congressional District seat.
Still, the 26-year-old knocked on voters' doors every day, tapped an online network for donations and fielded a passionate corps of volunteers who didn't mind working 16-hour days, crashing on sofas and surviving on homemade tortas.
That's the upside of being a young candidate: the energy, the idealism, the ability to manipulate giant social networks to spread your message.
The downside is your Facebook page.
--
With so much on the ballot to consider, Pleitez probably wouldn't have registered a blip on the radar if not for the Facebook flap.
The campaign against him took an ugly turn when opponent Gil Cedillo -- a veteran state senator who also wound up losing -- used photos from Pleitez's Facebook page in attack mailers intended to undercut the candidate's clean-cut image.
One mailer asked in English and Spanish, "Should this man represent you in the House of Representatives or in 'Animal House'?"
The photo underneath featured a group of young people, Pleitez in the rear, his face circled in red.
Like the other two guys, he is smiling and wearing a tie. The young women are wearing skirts, suits, sweaters. Some are mugging playfully for the camera.
All seven of the women are black. And one of them is my oldest daughter.
"You won't believe this," she said one evening last week, carrying her laptop into the kitchen to show me the fliers. "I'm in somebody's campaign ad."
Other snapshots showed Pleitez dancing, hoisting a drink, lounging with a guy in a baseball cap, hugging a procession of young white women.
"Lots of women, hard liquor, dancing on the table and all night partying," the mailer said. ". . . Even nerdy guys want to be cool." "PARTY ANIMAL" had been scrawled across one picture. Other photos showed Pleitez "flashing gang signs," the mailer said.
The ad was supposed to frighten Pleitez supporters into Cedillo's camp, and it did scare off some voters.
But others saw it as a desperate attempt to tarnish not only Pleitez, but also the hard-working young people associated with him.
The "Animal House" photo that includes my daughter was taken at a gathering of Stanford students during their study abroad semester in Santiago, Chile. Some of those young women are now in law school or working on PhDs. Others are teachers, nurses, directors of nonprofit groups. Hardly the stuff of "Girls Gone Wild."
