Can anyone explain the latest peculiar turn in the City Council race?
At mid-morning, it remains a puzzle.
The offbeat City Council campaign of Robert Zirgulis took another unharmonious turn yesterday at the noon hour.
The following 115-word email arrived presumably on numerous desks across the Westside, including this one:
Hello,
How are you? I hope fine.Please am writing in a hurry, sorry I did not inform you about my trip.I traveled to London for a seminar,but was attacked and mugged at gun point on my way to my hotel room and stranded because my credit card does not work down here. As I am writing, I am doing so from the hotel cafe, which is my sole means of communication now. Please I really appreciate if you could do me a favor by loaning me the sum of £1200 pounds so that I can pay for my hotel bills and get back home. I promise to refund it as soon as I return home next week. Thanks for your help.
Robert Zirgulis.
I read it twice, as every journalist should when there is a strikingly odd development.
Then I re-read parts of it.
Each reading of the supposed cry for help was a horse race between bizarre and unbelievable.
Obviously a prank?
As the underdog in the four-cornered race for two Council seats, Mr. Zirgulis proudly has branded himself as the “unorthodox candidate,” pinning it on his chest as a badge of honor.
My first reaction: Did Mr. Zirgulis send this email to draw attention to himself in a campaign where he undoubtedly is running in fourth place?
Emphatically no, was the candidate’s answer. I believe he was telling the truth.
He says somebody broke into his email system, a plausible response.
But why?
If a prank was pulled, it is a particularly despicable act because Mr. Zirgulis not only is not a mean person, he is vulnerable.
Hopefully, Don Pedersen’s cops will corner and catch the guttersnipe who did this — first, so that we can publicize his identity.
If the race were snug, if Mr. Zirgulis were closing ground on the favored three contenders, all of whom, he has argued loudly and repeatedly, are tools of two City Hall “machines,” such a break-in would be mean but understandable.
Do any of the other three candidates have anything to say?
His machine charge invariably brings titters, and sometimes worse, from Mr. Zirgulis’s audiences.
This is unfortunate because he deserves more respectable treatment.
I said last week after his appearance at the Culver City Democratic Club that he needs to sharply tone down his message, which carries shards of seriousness that are buried beneath his excessive showmanship.
From what I have seen, the showmanship, the exaggerated gestures, only come out when he has an audience. In private life, he is a serious person. But he has to dump the exaggerations and sell his message in a sincere, normal tone.
