Oelrich campaign reacts to my post...sort of...

I think I smell smoke...

Last week, the Steve Oelrich for Congress campaign sent out a press release expressing outrage at a mailer sent by one of his primary opponents, Cliff Stearns, in which he claimed that the reason he was ineligible for military service was because of injuries he received during his law enforcement career.

However, as I noted in a post last week, publicly available documents show that the injury that made Oelrich ineligible for military service happened in a hunting accident when he was a teenager, before he was a police officer.

I made several attempts to reach the Oelrich campaign for a response, including calling the campaign's press contact, and reaching out on twitter, but I never heard back from them.

The Oelrich Campaign Strategy
for dealing with bad press

This weekend, I noticed that the campaign had, in fact, reacted to my post. Well, sort of...they never responded to me or bothered to address any of the information in my post. What they did was delete their original press release (quoted in my post here), and replace it with a new one that no longer mentions any reason that Oelrich didn't serve in the military or any claims about his injuries.

The "new" press release was posted this weekend, but is still dated July 26, 2012, even though it was definitely written and posted later than that. That's not the standard protocol for how corrections to press releases are handled (although, technically, this was not a correction, but a deletion of the entire press release and a complete replacement).

This strange behavior raises a long list of other questions. Was this "new" press release emailed to local press this weekend? Was it sent out with the correct date, or backdated to July 26 like the website? Why was the original press release deleted? Does this mean that the campaign admits that the original press release was incorrect? Who approved the original press release?

Again, I repeat my invitation to the Oelrich campaign: if you have a response for why you claimed that Steve Oelrich was ineligible for military service due to injuries during his law enforcement career when publicly available documents say otherwise, or an explanation for why you edited the press release on your website, send it to me at sarahrumpf at gmail dot com, and I'll post it here.

Until then, it seems that voters in Florida's Third District are left with no choice but to assume that the Oelrich campaign deliberately and cynically attempted to mislead them.


See also:

Sunshine State Sarah | I'm hoping Steve Oelrich can explain this