Gopal’s only political play is to attack the integrity of the candidates he’s running against, regardless of the veracity of the attack.
Vin Gopal is setting himself up for another fall. photo via facebook
By Art Gallagher
In the aftermath of Red Bank Council President Art Murphy announcing on MoreMonmouthMusings that he would resign his seat on the borough council and withdraw as a candidate for another term, Monmouth Demcoratic Chairman Vin Gopal complained to the Asbury Park Press and The Two River Times that he has a hard time recruiting candidates to run for office because of the toxic political environment.
“I think it (Murphy’s resignation) is part of a larger problem, and he’s been thinking about it for a while,” Gopal said. “It’s about how negative and nasty local campaigns have been getting.”
Gopal however, said Murphy’s decision was not solely in response to the video. “It’s part of a larger problem with contemporary politics,” Gopal said, alleging that political opponents had on the sly recorded Murphy, unbeknownst to the councilman and released it for political gain.
“It’s sad it’s come to this,” Gopal said, noting that these tactics increasingly have been making it difficult to get qualified candidates.”
First of all, it is very obvious, if you consider his slates of legislative, county and municipal candidates throughout the county since becoming Chairman in 2012, that Gopal has been having a hard time recruiting candidates long before Murphy’s video was released on YouTube and published first by RedBankGreen.
More importantly, Gopal himself has created the toxic political environment in Monmouth County, to the extent that there is one.
In 2013, Gopal falsely accused Sean DiSomma, then a Republican candidate for council and now the Red Bank GOP Chairman, of being a fugitive from justice with an arrest warrant out for him in Texas over an unpaid traffic ticket. There was no warrant for DiSomma’s arrest.
I was reasonably friendly with Gopal at that time. Even before I exposed the fact that his accusation against DiSomma was false, I asked him why he was going negative and how he would feel if the Republicans counter punched. Red Bank Councilman Ed Zipprich was a candidate for Assembly in the 11th district that year. The Republicans were sitting on proof that Zipprich had been arrested for DWI and driving the wrong way on the Garden State Parkway in December of 2010. “Do you want Zipprich’s DWI to become an issue?” I asked Gopal. “Go for it, if you have it,” he shouted back at me.
I was frankly surprised. Gopal wanted a nasty political environment.
Gopal’s only political play is to attack the integrity of the candidates he’s running against, regardless of the veracity of the attack.
Last year, Gopal’s freeholder campaign was a disgusting and baseless attack on the integrity of Freeholders Lillian Burry and Gary Rich over former Manalapan Mayor Andrew Lucas’s crimes, which they had nothing to do with.
Earlier this year, when he should have been busy recruiting quality candidates, Gopal and his flunkies spent hours scouring the archives of the facebook pages of Monmouth County Republicans. Then, via his new blog, he launched attacks accusing Union Beach Mayor Paul Smith and Victoria Dean, a Marlboro Board of Education member and the wife the the then Marlboro GOP Chairman Christopher Dean, of being racists because of what other people posted on facebook.
The early indications are that Gopal’s 2015 county campaign will once again be based character assassination.
The campaign literature for Gopal’s candidate for County Clerk that was distributed at the Monmouth County Fair dedicates a full page to attacking the integrity of County Clerk Christine Giordano Hanlon, with no basis. Gopal is so inept that the page does not include the candidate’s full name. So I’ll refer to him only as Kevin, as he is referred to in his own fictional literature. If he wants the name recognition that this site provides, Kevin can buy an ad or sit for a one on one interview with me.
Today is the day that the ballot column positioning gets determined. By law, the County Clerk or a Deputy County Clerk picks a capsule with the party names out of a well shaken bin. The “winner” gets column one on the ballot. The “loser” gets column two.
This morning, Gopal sent out a press release wherein he accused former County Clerk M. Claire French of refrigerating one of the capsules and choosing the cold one so that Republicans would win the first ballot position, which, remarkably, they did 30 of 33 times prior to 2012. In his release, Gopal announced that he would have attorneys present this afternoon for the drawing and threatened Hanlon, herself a former prosecutor, with prosecution if “any inappropriate activity is suspected.”
What Gopal didn’t know when he issued his release is that Hanlon, a former prosecutor, former judicial clerk and a Trustee of the Monmouth County Bar Association, has recused herself from drawing the capsule because she is on the ballot in November. A Deputy County Clerk will draw the capsule. Such integrity would not occur to Gopal.
Gopal will continue to have a hard time recruiting good candidates to run for office for as long as he runs dirty campaigns. The Monmouth County voters are on to his game and they are tired of it. The smart Monmouth Democrats are also on to Gopal’s game. They know that the Monmouth Republicans will counter punch when necessary. Kevin better hope his campaign doesn’t get any traction, so long as Vin is running a dirty campaign.
Monmouth County Republican Chairman Shaun Golden does not have a problem recruiting quality candidates to run for office. Golden did not have a problem being reelected Sheriff, in a landslide, in 2013, along with his running mates Freeholders Tom Arnone and Serena DiMaso, while bracketed in Column 2 on the ballot.
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