Bill White's campaign repeats negative...

Pointing out that an opponent is making an attack is a tricky thing... you have to be careful not to merely repeat the negative attack and give it credibility.

Rick has been going around... and his peeps too... saying that Houston's city hall is broke due to Bill White's kick the can down the road mentality.

This is not some secret (link). I blogged it before, and I will blog it again. Excerpt follows...

Let's get this straight... the city of Houston under Bill White saw its debt skyrocket and now has $5,720 debt per capita. California's debt is $2,808 per person...

Is 5,720 divided by 2 greater than 2,808?

Yes.

Case closed.

The claim should have been called "true" and there is nothing else to say about it.

For more context, think about it this way...

Another large city in Texas, San Antonio... the 7th largest city in America... has debt per capita of $1,808. Rick's peeps could start saying that Bill White's Houston has 3 times the per person debt than a comparable large Texas city San Antonio. That statement would be 100% true based on the facts.

Rick's peeps could also say that Houston's city debt per capita is higher than all the other major Texas cities including Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, plus Waco, Tyler, Lubbock, Abilene, Amarillo, El Paso, Beaumont, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Midland, Odessa, San Angelo, Texarkana, Temple, and just about every other city big or small... Houston is an outlier because of Bill White.

The state of Texas has $1,368 state debt per capita... the second lowest state debt in the nation... Rick's peeps could say with 100% truth that Bill White's city of Houston has 4 times more debt per capita than Rick's state of Texas.

Rick's peeps could also claim that of America's large cities, Houston has the second highest debt per capita after only New York City... NEW YORK CITY??!! Get a rope.

So Houston has the second highest large city debt per capita in the nation because of Bill White... and Texas has the second lowest state debt per capita in the nation because of Rick...

Houston... in terms of the people and businesses... doing just fine... but in terms of the governmental unit that Bill White ran... and Houston has a strong mayor governmental system where the mayor rules with an iron fist... that city hall is doing very badly... deeply in the hole.

Bill White's peeps pushed out this negative on themselves... Rick's peeps should put this on their finance report as an in kind contribution from the White camp...

Who are the adults at the Bill White campaign? I hear more and more from insiders that Bill White is micro managing the show... and he is proving to be not that great of a manager or political mind. Don't repeat a negative unless it is so absurd... so over the top... so vitriolic... so stupid... and so easy to knock down. This is a pretty reasonable argument, stated in a reasonable tone, from a reasonable and credible source. All this does is give Rick's argument that Bill White ran Houston poorly more credibility.