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Which Metro candidate publicly challenged gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to a duel? Boasted of a girlfriend's tequila-drinking prowess? Says it's fun to shoot big guns to scare "the hell out of your liberal friends"? Is a self-described "outlaw Democrat" and rails against the "latte and Thai food crowd" that runs the donkey party? No, it's not Ruth McFarland. It's John Jackley, the Mr. Mom candidate from West Linn. The wild-man image hardly fits Jackley, a soft-spoken suburbanite who arrived at a WW interview with his toddler in tow. But not too long ago, Jackley, 42, was a Capitol Hill hack--a press secretary for three congressmen, including one he described as "Hannibal Lecter without the cage." That experience led Jackley to write two books--Hill Rat and Below the Beltway--about Capitol Hill culture, and to brag, in the forward to his second book, about his own cranky, gun-toting personality. One voter called WW to say she found Jackley's books "bizarre" and "scary." Jackley, who's now writing a novel, is unrepentant. "In writing and politics I'm just gonna be myself and do it the way I want to do it," he says. "People like a little authenticity." Some candidates are willing to bleed for votes. Last week Deborah Kafoury was out knocking on doors in the Northeast Portland neighborhoods she wants to represent in the state House. She climbed onto the porch of one house in the Piedmont neighborhood, only to hear a growl and feel a chomp on her arm, as if Cujo had come back to take revenge on first-time candidates. "I ran. I bolted," Kafoury recalls. "The dog--a German shepherd--was on a chain. It seemed like the chain kept going and going.... Either that dog was slow or adrenaline does amazing things." Kafoury wouldn't give WW the name of the shepherd's owners--although she says they didn't even apologize to her. "I don't want to lose their vote," she says. "The wife was a frequent voter." Kafoury tried to hawk the dog bite for campaign contributions at last week's X-PAC meeting, saying she'd show it for $25. No one bit. "One guy offered me $10," she says, "so I showed him." Charges continue to fly in the County Commission race between Barbara Willer and Lisa Naito. In the latest attack, Willer says Naito lied in campaign literature that blames Willer for $3,600 in fraudulent Visa charges. Naito's literature claims that when Willer published Naito's credit card number in an attack piece about travel expenses, "$3600 was charged to Lisa's account by unknown citizens." Naito's campaign manager says the Visa cash advances were incurred Feb. 4. Willer says the attack piece wasn't mailed until Feb. 9. "I believe she's lying in tying the charges to me," says Willer. Naito insists that her own literature is accurate. "The charges occurred after they probably put together the piece and printed it. It, and my credit card number, was out there," Naito says. She maintains that neither she nor her husband has ever taken cash advances, and neither lost a card. She says she's still waiting to get hard copies of the cash advance transaction from Visa. According to a Visa spokesman, it is possible that someone could have seen Naito's credit card number, made a counterfeit card and reived cash advances from a bank. |
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