What goes around comes around

During medieval times, jousters would practice their sport by lancing a dummy opponent set up on a pivot know to some history buffs as a Quintain post. One end of the dummy would bear a shield or target, at which the jouster could aim his lance. On the other end, there was usually a counter weight to balance the mechanism and offer a deterrent for any ill-timed blows. Someone slow with the lance would strike the target and would promptly have several hundred pounds swinging rock bearing down on his horse.

This ingenious and sometimes painful device proved of little value after the demise of jousting. Even the Renaissance fair warriors are less than keen to the notion of being unseated from their steed by a hurtling pile of rocks. But the device did give pundits an operant idiom to use whenever a certain political candidate spells their own doom: What goes around comes around.

In the case of state Senate’s 43rd district candidate Joanne Yepsen, it’s certainly coming around now. The Saratoga Springs supervisor is just days away from having the plug pulled on her ill-fated campaign after the state Board of Elections upheld the disqualification of nearly a quarter of the signatures she submitted to run. In the end, they ruled she had collected 968 signatures, which is an admirable amount, but still short of the number she needed.

Obviously frustrated by the challenge, Yepsen lashed out at the one person she could: fellow 43rd candidate Mike Russo, the other last-minute entry into the race. She blamed Russo for orchestrating the challenge, a charge that may or may not be valid as there were three people who disputed the validity of her petitions. Naturally, Russo denied her allegation. He may have been vindicated too. The Daily Gazette reported Tuesday one of three Yepsen challenges was made by Donna Lynch, a woman identifying herself as the sister of former city Supervisor Cheryl Keyrouze.

“Lynch denied a connection with any campaign,” the Gazette reported. “However, she said she is the sister of Cheryl Keyrouze, a former Saratoga Springs county supervisor, and did not care for the faction in Saratoga Springs politics led by former Mayor Valerie Keehn.”

Update: a Post Star reporter has corrected the above. Indeed there are four disputes to Yepsen’s petition, with Lynch’s being among them. But Yepsen remains undeterred by the challenge. After a pow-wow with the very faction that may have lead to her demise, she decided to petition the Supreme Court Thursday in an effort to remain on the ballot.

And the plot thickens. Few people outside of the local party committees recognized the feud developing between Keyrouze and Yepsen in the run up to and following the colossal disaster that befell the city Democrats during the 2007 general election. There were far bigger battles to wage for the electorate to get that upset about a three-way race for two essentially moot supervisor seats on the Republican-dominated county board. Yepsen, who was then best described as a sort of fence-sitter between the great democratic divide between the McTygue and Keehn factions, decided to throw her allegiance behind the later.

In doing so, Yepsen also bought into the splinter faction’s mantra, which was to demonize anyone affiliated with McTygue, McTygue’s friends, or even breathing in the same room as either. There were accusations that she crossed party lines to embrace Republican challenger Matt Veitch in order to oust Keyrouze from her seat. Less than a month later, the alleged plot had obviously traveled back to Keyrouze, who fired out a rather coarse missive to Party Leader Lou Schneider, asking him not to send her any information regarding Yepsen.

“She is a fraud,” she wrote in the December letter. “Her best quality is fooling the public and her worst quality is [not] knowing what good government is or even understanding it.”

But there are others who speculate it wasn’t the Keyrouze kin that drilled cannonball-sized hole in hull of Yepsen’s senatorial bid. In fact, it was Keehn propellant Shawn “Nuke ‘Em” Thompson who spelled her doom by inserting a few of his own petitions from his state committee run in with Yepsen’s.

Update: The Saratogian’s City Desk reports Yepsen had a quick rap with Keehn and her former deputy mayor, Eileen Finneran during a lull in Tuesday’s City Council meeting. Talk about playing with fire...

Months ago, a rumor drifted across Saratoga County, insinuating Yepsen and Keehn would make a push to oust Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno and Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco from their respective strongholds. Keehn would challenge Bruno, while Yepsen would take a swing at Tedisco, according to the rumor. Word of this plot was leaked to a Times Union columnist, who published it and caused laughter to erupt across the city for several weeks.

However, there was a grain of truth to the rumor, which likely originated with Thompson. Being a paid shill for the Democratic minority leader, Thompson likely caught wind of Bruno’s impending retirement and started grinding the warped gears of his political machine. Undoubtedly, it was these gears that started to grind again when Bruno finally announced his retirement in June.

On a side note, the timing for Bruno’s retirement certainly coincided with the deadline to submit petitions for the race. Who wants to guess whether hand-picked successor Roy McDonald had an idea he’d be running for the seat months in advance?

Unfortunately, Yepsen already had her eye on Bruno’s seat. Thompson tried to elevate Keehn as the more worthy of the two, but quickly realized he’d only spur a four-way race that would eat all the party’s money and end in a loss to McDonald. So to simplify things, he inserted a Trojan horse among Yepsen’s petitions, knowing that someone from her growing list of political enemies would inevitably challenge them.

Yepsen still has another day to weed through her signatures and find 32 that could go either way. But even if she does, the whole affair must leave her wondering where her allies now stand, if she even has any. Returning to the jousting analogy, politics is a fast-paced game, where if you don’t thrust first and the hardest, you could end up staring at the sky and wondering if the stars you’re seeing are real.