What a contentious primary election we have this year.

I have been in small town newspapers for 18 years and I can honestly say I have never seen anything quite like this.

I am referring, of course, to the race for prosecuting attorney on the Republican ticket.

The sheriff's race is hotly contested with lots of candidates out to get your vote, but the GOP's prosecutor's race is a real doozy.

And somehow I have been dragged into it.

A local judge just this week accused me and this newspaper of having a pro-David Kolbe bias.

This, I assume, because of a story we ran about a couple cops who got into hot water in the Dating Dynamics case.

An attorney for the owner of the dating place says the cops were doing a little Kolbe-bashing on the job. The attorney says they asked the owner to write a derogatory letter about Kolbe to a magazine.

This, if true, would make it very difficult to prosecute the case against the dating place, wouldn't you say?

But running the story apparently makes the newspaper pro-Kolbe because it looked as if the cops were picking on Kolbe.

There is no love lost between the city cops and Kolbe, no question. Everybody in town knows that.

In fact, I know of one person who contributed to Kolbe's campaign but refused to put a Kolbe sign in his yard.

Why?

He's afraid of reprisals from the Warsaw Police Department.

I think this person is overreacting. I don't think the police would pick on anybody who supports Kolbe.

But isn't it kind of sad that somebody even thinks they would?

Kolbe has been critical of some of the investigative tactics of the WPD. And WPD officers have been critical of Kolbe's handling of cases.

But these are all intelligent, well-intentioned public servants.

You would think that they could sit down and work through some of these issues, reach some sort of compromise.

In fact, I even offered to sit down with Kolbe and the police chief - off the record - and discuss some of these issues. The meeting never happened because the city attorney advised the police chief that it might not be a good idea.

So anyway, we run the Dating Dynamics story and it doesn't make Kolbe look bad. That makes us pro-Kolbe in the eyes of the Kolbe haters.

And of course that is a bad thing because everybody knows what an evil man Kolbe is.

To read our letters page you would think he eats his young.

(Isn't it odd that this pro-Kolbe newspaper runs all those anti-Kolbe letters?)

I've disagreed with Kolbe decisions. He knows that. We've talked about it.

The only thing I wrote about Kolbe was negative.

In this column I criticized his recommendation to modify the sentence of a convicted drug offender.

A woman sentenced to 30 years was out of jail in eight months.

I pointed out how this makes it tough for cops to do their job. How it makes it look like our county is a good place to get a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Funny how back then nobody whined about me having a pro-cop bias.

During this campaign we've tried to give the candidates equal coverage. But nonetheless, just this week someone from the Kolbe camp complained that we missed the last couple of Kolbe's meetings.

Then comes the prosecutor's forum and candidate Dan Hampton goes to an area radio station for a tape of the proceedings because he contends he was inaccurately portrayed in the newspaper.

And a Kolbe supporter says that he thought our coverage of the forum wasn't fair to Kolbe.

Frankly, I think our reporter, Tiffany Shaw, was much too easy on both of them. (To whom it may concern: Please, stop sending Tiffany nasty e-mail. She doesn't have much hair left to pull out.)

I wasn't at the forum, but I spoke with several people who were. They unanimously agreed that both Kolbe and Hampton were much nastier than our story made them out to be.

This is also borne out by the fact that Kosciusko Superior Court III Judge Joe Sutton has sought a tape of the prosecutor's forum, too.

Sutton wants to hear exactly what Kolbe said during the forum in regard to misdeeds by local police and a judge.

Kolbe denies alleging any wrongdoing.

Kolbe says Hampton tried to bribe him out of the last election. Hampton denies it.

Accusations and denials - accusations and denials.

All the while I am hearing from Hampton supporters how pro-Kolbe the newspaper is. And at the same time I get to hear from the Kolbe supporters how unfair the newspaper is to Kolbe.

I just know the Kolbe people reading this think the Hampton people are crazy and vice versa.

Absurd, isn't it?

I haven't heard anything from the Chuck Waggoner folks. He asked for a tape of the prosecutor's forum, too. We called to ask him why. He wasn't in when we called.

His wife returned our call. She said when they heard the radio station was making tapes available to all the candidates for free, they wanted to get one so Waggoner's mom could listen to it.

How refreshing.

Perhaps the other two candidates and their supporters should quit spending so much time throwing darts.

I think negative campaigning turns people off, especially at the local level. All those ads and letters to the editor saying bad things about candidates can't be perceived well.

Negative campaigning is probably one of the biggest reasons people get fed up with the whole political process.

I guess the reason for this column is because I don't like the newspaper being accused of news bias.

There is bias everywhere in our opinion columns, but news should be objective.

It is not an unusual thing for newspapers to be accused of bias. It happens all the time. But in the case of this prosecutors' race, we have tried pretty hard to give all the candidates a fair shake.

If I have a bias, it's not against a candidate. It's against the negative, personal attack style of campaigning.

Hang on, voters. We've got 17 days to go! [[In-content Ad]]