DOES CLUPPER HAVE A FOOL FOR A CLIENT?

"A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client"
Legal Adage

By Juan Montoya
That saying could well apply to candidates for the Brownsville Independent School District who prepare their own campaign material.
We have just received a tri-fold flier that Don Clupper, the mathematician cum school board member candidate is handing out around town. Now, we're not going to pretend that we are algebra geeks by any stretch of the imagination. If Mr. Clupper taught math for 22 years at Pace and Porter, we're sure he knows his numbers.
But preparing campaign literature is a horse of a different color.
In the flier, which features a distorted portrait of Don with his three (obviously Hispanic) granddaughters on the front, Clupper makes his pitch to get the voters of the district to vote for him and replace incumbent Catalina Presas Garcia. He also urges them not to vote for the Juan Manuel "Butch" Barbosa, the third candidate in Position 5.
After listing his credentials as a math teacher, Clupper states that his goal as a board member (should you, dear reader, pull his lever), will be to "stop declining test scores, improve curriculum in mathematics," push for more algebra, etc..
Now, last time we looked, there was a furor over the board members micromanaging the teachers and other personnel in the BISD. What Clupper can do sitting on the board about algebra instruction is hard to fathom since board members are supposed to worry about district policies and finances and leave the teaching to the teachers.
He then plows into Butch's performance as the chairman of the BISD Bond Oversight Committee by promising to "stop wasteful and unnecessary construction, resolve huge discrepancies regarding bond issues handled by the BISD bond committee which in turn will raise taxes" (this committee is headed by his opponent, Juan Manuel "Butch" Barbosa).
These would be laudable goals if not for the fact that the bond money has already been spent and there is basically no bond issues to oversee. That Barbosa performed poorly as a bond committee chairman is not in dispute (cost overruns, change order galore, etc.). But to promise to oversee something that has already been spent taxes the imagination. Clupper, from Tennessee, should remember an adage from that state that states that there's no use closing the gate after the horse has left the barn.
Now comes the kicker.
In his next paragraph he calls the incumbent "Catlin Precas Garcia" and charges that she is running in "pl" 5 to avoid running against Herman Otis Powers again. We recall that Catalina Presas-Garcia beat Powers rather handily last time. What makes Clupper think that given Powers' role in the Tony Juarez-Hector Gonzales fiasco voters would choose him over Catalina? Wishful thinking because he suddenly has to face her in his race, Cata being known as indefatigable campaigner?
The misspellings are bad enough, but then he states that her record on the board has resulted in "lower test scores, higher taxes." Here we go again. Einstein could be on the BISD board and he couldn't help what the test scores (under a new scoring formula) results would be. In fact, more than half of the school districts in Texas didn't make the score and a full 30 states are asking for federal waivers as a result of the new scoring method.
He then calls Barbosa a "career politician," which may be correct. But the he reaches and gropes about for a cheap hit on Butch when he says he is a "former city council man known as on of the (sic) Three Amigos."
Whaaat?
There appears to be a redundancy of articles and prepositions in that last sentence, but apparently Don didn't run it through a proof reader. We have also been guilty of that more than once in this blog, but then again, we're not running for public office. We won't even go near the Spanish translation which is nothing short of atrocious.
The he waxes gratitude to the Cheezmeh group for giving him the time of day and leaving his stuff on their site. We'll write that off as a rookie mistake.
We're sure Clupper is a good man who means well, but an offering like the flier we just mentioned shows that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.