Pacific Views

Dean Supporter Attacks Officer, Young Woman

Or rather, that's the headline you would have read if a Dean supporter had been involved in the following story. The night of the New Hampshire debate at St. Anselm college, someone rudely brushed by me, and I turned to see a police officer dragging off a cuffed, male demonstrator wearing something yellow. I figured I'd read about it the next day, and I was pretty preoccupied with my frozen fingers. (Since I keep mentioning the unfortunate digits, I'm sure readers have gotten the impression by now that I spent an inordinate amount of my trip focused on them. Those readers would be correct.)

But I didn't read about it. I didn't get a chance to start looking into it until I got home last week, and it took a while to track some things down. But here's the story.

I called around to find the prosecutor for the arrest. Duly located, I asked about any arrests at the site and night of the debate. There were two. One was a criminal trespass charge against someone who'd snuck into the Spin Gallery and refused to leave, another was an arrest for assault that occurred outside at the rally. That sounded like the one.

The arrestee, who I'll refer to as JM, was described in the report as wearing a yellow Fire Fighters for Kerry jacket and/or pin. The incident began with JM trying to grab a Clark sign out of the hands of 23 year old LH. A Bedford, NH police sergeant intervened, and JM moved off. He then, according to the police report, hit the sergeant on the shoulder, knocking him down. JM lunged at LH and hit her in the face, and was shortly thereafter cuffed.

The prosecutor volunteered that all this had happened without any Republicans being there at all. Also, there were unconfirmed reports from earlier that day of a group of men wearing Fire Fighters for Kerry insignia getting publicly drunk.

I did a Google on his name, and turned up a short column about him in a California paper local to his town of origin. He was described as a Clark supporter, and a former National Guardsman. Chris Smith, the reporter who wrote it, referred me to two other Clark supporters he'd spoken to for the story. One man was the head of the Sonoma county Clark group, and said that he'd known JM as a Clark supporter since October or November. The other was a Clark volunteer who donated his frequent flier miles to get JM to New Hampshire, but had never met him.

In talking with Mr. Smith, another detail came together. The JM in California is self-employed, as per Smith's notes and the police report, both. The partial address given to me by the prosecutor matched the full address found at the website of JM's fledgling online enterprise, a web address that had been given to Mr. Smith when he was writing his story prior to the fateful trip to New Hampshire.

My number was passed on to the mysterious JM, and he called me today. I asked him who he'd traveled to NH to support, and he said Clark. When I read some details that I'd been given by the prosecutor, I got no objections, but when I then mentioned the arrest, he just said he didn't know anything about that. We ended the call after that, because I really didn't have any questions I wanted to ask him about organizing for Clark.

And then I thought, you know, maybe if he was telling the truth he'd be interested in knowing more. So a few minutes later I called back, offering to share the details with him so he could clear them up if he wanted to. He made polite noises as I recounted the name of the precinct, the arraignment date, and the contact information of the prosecutor. He didn't ask for time to get a pen, or to have anything repeated for spelling or accuracy. And at the end, he said he was very busy and had to return to another call.

Is there a point to all of this? I don't know. But here are two things I know for certain. 1) If someone contacted me out of the blue to ask about an arrest I didn't know about for two counts of assault at a recent travel venue, I'd be grilling them for details. 2) I don't have a clear idea what the JM who was arrested in New Hampshire was doing there, but I feel fairly certain that if he'd been a Dean volunteer, I wouldn't have been the one making these phone calls.

I can read the headlines now, "An angry candidate's angry supporter." "Dean's temper rubbing off on supporters." "Should Dean be locked up pre-emptively to protect other candidates?" But I'm sure the press would have been restrained about it. I mean, it isn't like they'd have repeated the story 600 times, or anything.

Update: In a minor correction, it should be noted that Chris Smith had not previously contacted the two Clark supporters referenced above, he just had their contact information available.