Susan Gwinn's "Raw Truth" is just a little too raw for me.

"Raw Truth" is just a little too raw for me.

Athens County, Southeast of Columbus, may be about to set a horribly bad precedent.

Susan Gwinn, the entrenched Democratic Party Chairperson is running a well-funded and aggressively negative campaign for County Prosecutor.

The possibility of having a very political Democratic fox guarding the henhouse of a majority Democratic county has even local Democrats concerned.

Have you ever read a Letter to the Editor from a candidate, complaining about not being endorsed by a paper? Gwinn wrote a letter to a newspaper excoriating it for not endorsing her. This is the ultimate in whining self-service, and gives us good insight into the future behavior of the Prosecutor's office under Ms. Gwinn.

Reading Ms. Gwinn's "Raw Truth" letter castigating the Athens News for their endorsement of incumbent C. David Warren in the County Prosecutor’s Race helped me decide my vote. Do we really need a County Prosecutor who so obviously combines the personal with the political and who publicly "prosecutes" her grudges?

Members of her own party have already pointed out the potential partisan problems of the county Democratic Party chair holding the office of Prosecuting Attorney. It is blatantly antithetical to the historically fair principles of the Democratic Party and evidence that Athens County does not need Ms. Gwinn and her penchant for publicizing personal disagreements while holding a position that plainly demands fairness and dictates restrained good judgement.


Athens News Editor Terry Smith on Gwinn:

"For me, this race comes down to three issues, and all of them trump the isolated and exaggerated problems that Gwinn has raised about incumbent Athens County Prosecutor C. David Warren. Interestingly her criticisms didn’t gain purchase in the public conversation until she filed to challenge Warren in the primary.

The three issues:

1. She has no experience as a prosecutor, and he has decades. How some people can ignore this fundamental advantage for Warren is beyond me. This especially applies to the Democratic office-holders who have come out for Gwinn. It makes me wonder whether some of them are mainly looking toward the future and their own skins by supporting their influential party chief for a position that she’s obviously not qualified for.

2. As party chief, she has no business serving as the prosecutor, a position of power and discretion that ought to be as non-partisan as possible, and where she’ll constantly be stumbling over potential conflicts of interest. Most of those who think this is OK are the Democratic faithful. I wonder why this is? Has anyone asked the Republicans how they’d feel about having one of the county’s chief law enforcers also managing the opposition party? If you look at the arguments in the pro-Gwinn letters, many of their points do highly recommend Gwinn — except not for prosecutor but for party chief, a position she already holds. How, for instance, does Gwinn’s success at getting students registered as Democrats relate to how she would run the prosecutor’s office?

3. Her campaign ads — including professionally done TV commercials that seem more appropriate for a statewide race than a small county’s prosecutor’s contest — are unfailingly negative and often unfair and misleading. They reflect worse on Ms. Gwinn than Mr. Warren."


If Gwinn is elected look for a politically hand-cuffed Prosecutor's Office resulting in long-term damage to judicial process in Athens County.