McAllen ISD
I can’t think of a single election won by a so-called sex scandal, but I can think of a few lost by carnality. The most famous perhaps being that of Democratic frontrunner presidential candidate Gary Hart who dropped out of the 1988 primary after revelations of extramarital affairs were uncovered.
Just as well because obviously Gary wasn’t the lightest crayon in the box. When confronted by the media with questions concerning adultery, he dared them to follow him around to prove he was faithful to his wife: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.”
Some reporters took old Gary up on his offer and found him hanging out with a beautiful young blonde named Donna Rice. One of the photos, ironically, was taken while Hart was aboard a boat aptly named “Monkey Business,” with the lovely Miss Rice comfortably seated smack dab in the middle of Gary’s election (lap).
Hart would later claim that he wasn’t really challenging the press to follow him around, to “skulk around in the shadows of his home,” as he put it, but the photo damage done to his presidential aspirations had already proven impossible to overcome.
Same problems befell former San Antonio Mayor and rising Dem star Henry Cisneros and Dem Presidential Contender John Edwards, who bore the added sin of cheating on his wife while she was battling breast cancer. He subsequently dropped out of the 2008 presidential race.
Cisneros actually one day might have won the presidency, such was his charisma and good looks, but his lust for the ladies, mainly blonde, couldn’t be satiated.
The Old Days
In the old days, up through the JFK era, the media didn’t pry into the private lives of politicians. FDR had his long-time mistress, and in fact, the media did him a solid by hiding from the public, his polio. JFK had his mistresses, and the media didn’t pry, didn’t expose his affairs, even when Marilyn Monroe sang him that Happy Birthday song dripping with sensuality, with the First Lady sitting beside him.
LBJ, Gerald Ford, Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush seemed downright boring in comparison, and then came the man from Arkansas.
Bill Clinton might have gotten away with his Monica deal if not for the era in which he served as president. By then, the early 1990s, the two parties, Dems and Republicans, were no longer interested in compromise or looking the other way. Instead, with the help of right-wing talk radio and Fox News, love them or hate them, the parties and indeed their constituents were ripping into each other like never before.
The Bill Clinton affair just gave them the chance to look righteous, even if the Republican speaker, Robert Livingston, had to say at the start of the impeachment that he was resigning because he, too, had had adulterous affairs. Weird because Livingston actually looked like a Baptist deacon.
People started thinking, is everyone in D.C. screwing around? Even guys like Newt who looked like a bloated plum? Apparently.
McAllen ISD
At the local level, I think this year’s McAllen ISD election taught us one thing: people are sick of talk about sex scandals, real or not. They’re sick of talk about sex vids showing up on school laptops. All of which throws mud at the district. Parents and teachers want to discuss education, teacher pay, student behavior, test scores, the budget, not who’s doing what to whom. Not to mention in which office.
Hence, the results of last Saturday’s election outcome: Place 1 challenger Lizzie Kittleman beat incumbent Marco Suarez by approximately 10 percent, and Place 5 challenger Erica De La Garza-Lopez beat incumbent Tony Forina by about eight percent of the vote.
With incumbent School Trustees Debbie Crane-Aliseda and Sam Saldivar supporting the campaigns of Kittleman and De La Garza-Lopez, there is indeed a new majority now overseeing the work of Superintendent Jay Gonzalez, and that’s not even including the other new board trustees Aaron Daniel Rivera and Lucia Regalado.
By all accounts, Tony Forina should have beaten Erica De La Garza-Lopez. He had more money in his campaign war chest. He had already been in office for eight years, having beaten Garza-Lopez eight years ago.
Just one problem. His name kept popping up in the stories and podcasts this paper published and broadcast centering around the so-called sex scandals, sex complaints tied to the school district last March. The stories/ podcasts weren’t anything personal against Forina. It’s just that he and his former pal and business partner, then the director of the ISD’s communication department, kept getting mentioned because of the school’s investigation into the alleged sex-related matter filed by an employee.
Those stories were also tied to the school district, and the school-board majority sure looked as if it was trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug, even if the assistant director of the department was claiming all of it was true.
Then social media didn’t help Forina, in my opinion, because they started blasting the woman filing the complaint, painting her in a bad light.
Not a good look for the district as a whole. Neither were the sex vids found on the school laptop, which allegedly included the face of a woman who claimed she didn’t really know a certain individual who was part of the internal investigation (not Forina).
Hence, in my opinion, the results of this year’s McAllen ISD school board race were, in part, due to the so-called McAllen ISD sex scandals of March 2023.
Out with the old; in with the new.