A 19-year-old nominee for the Kansas House of Representatives announced Sunday that he’s withdrawing from the race, months after admitting that he sent revenge porn and bullied girls online when he was in middle school.
Aaron Coleman, who was certified the winner of his Democratic primary election last week by just 14 votes, said he decided to drop out so he can “focus on caring for my family.”
“Now our party can pick a new nominee,” tweeted Coleman, who has faced calls for his withdrawal from prominent Kansas Democrats in response to accusations of online harassment against him.
More at the link.
I’m happy that such a person as he is has withdrawn. What I don’t understand is this gibberish in his statement:
“The phone calls of those who have voted for me in the primary have started to come in, and I’m filled with regret,” Coleman tweeted. “They all say essentially the same thing. I promise change, even now, but I’m sure they realize I’m promising when I cannot deliver.”
Be regrets that he can’t deliver change because he can’t run for office.
And Lord, in the normal way of things I wouldn’t hold middle school behavior against someone, but I think at 19 you’re still in the penumbra of middle school.
I want to know how he thinks “I promise change now that I cannot deliver” makes sense. Heck, I want to know how he is promising change when he is not running for office.
That’s sorta what I was thinking. For a ‘normal’ person running for office, things that happened in middle school would have been 30+ years ago and that passage of time makes it a lot easier for their PR people to dismiss it. Look at Brett Kavanaugh. If he was accused of exactly the same things as he was and all the witness said exactly the same things that they did but the only difference was that this all “allegedly” happened two years ago, it would have been a much higher hurdle for him to clear.
I have a bigger issue with this line:
"All I can say is, whoever the Democrat nominee is for house district 37, It wasn’t who the voters selected. I apologize to everyone who voted for me.”
I’m assuming this came out after he was nominated, meaning, the voters didn’t select someone that, just a few years prior, engaged in revenge porn and telling people to kill themselves because they’re overweight. And, with that, why is he apologizing to the people that voted for him? It seems like he’s trying to sound remorseful for what he did, but I have a feeling he’s not actually saying “I’m sorry I ran for public office while keeping this skeleton in my closet” but rather “I’m sorry you guys didn’t get to elect me”.
I think we’re going to see more and more and more of this as life goes on. Something commonly heard nowadays by people, say, 40 and over is that we’re glad that there isn’t a permanent record of everything we did. Again, look at Brett. If he did all that a few years ago, even if no one pulled out a camera and took pictures, certainly a few people would have mentioned it on twitter/fb. Those time and date stamped posts would have made for some powerful evidence.
More people should have the mindset of Carlton Banks or Alex Keaton and before doing something stupid remind themselves that they might want to run for office someday and don’t want this in their past.
I can only assume someone that won a nomination at 19 had an idea that they would work in the government when they were in middle school and even being that young would know that putting a nude picture of a classmate on the internet would derail their career at some point.
At 19 he probably lives at home (or in a dorm during the school year). I’m assuming “caring for my family”, even if that is just a common fluff line used when someone resigns due to a scandal, means he has to do damage control with his parents/siblings, not wife and kids.
I still hate that line. It drives me nuts that people use it as if to suggest they’re dropping out because the long hours on the campaign trail are too stressful and they need to spend some time at home. Like a store owner that decides they’re going to close on Sundays so they can finally get some time away from work.
What he did in middle school shouldn’t be held against him… in some kind of perfect world. In the real world it will, and it reflects on his judgment if he’s running for political office.
There was a kid I went to school with in PA that tried to go into politics when right out of high school. I don’t know that he ever succeeded but it gave me a start when a young man with the same name became a noted Republican political operative.
On the one hand, misdeeds done in middle school at least have some mitigation of immaturity to weigh against them. But revenge porn? That’s a heavy misdeed by any standard, and pretty damn hard to excuse.
When you’re 40, you’re a different person than you were at 14. The problem is, he’s 19. The majority of the assholes I new in middle school, were still assholes throughout college. Some have dramatically changed by their 20 (or more) year high school reunion, but I can’t think of anyone I avoided in grade school and wanted to be friends with a few years later.
If it’s been shown that he was cyber bullying people online in middle school, I’m willing to bet he was still doing it in high school. And, again, he’s only 19.
It would be different if he was doing it now. And there’s no magical cutoff age for being an asshole. The reality is that it will reflect on him at 19 whether it should or not, and indirectly it shows a lack of judgment for him to think it wouldn’t matter. Life ain’t fair, politics is even worse.
At 19, there is scant little else for people to look to and judge his character, no one is heavy on accomplishments at that age, after all.
But more importantly, sexual harassment, bullying and revenge porn are outright crimes, not youthful indiscretions. Men may choose to see it otherwise, but if they’re looking to get young women on side, they need to cut this guy loose.
Besides if he’s foolish enough to think these things would not surface when he decided to run, how smart or savvy can he really be?
People are saying things you did in the past (or way back in middle school) shouldn’t count against you now. I was just pointing out that his past is only a few years ago. It’s not like someone dug up a picture of him holding a joint 35 years ago.
Agreed. IF this isn’t to be held against him for the rest of his life, I think he should have taken the next few years to be very open about his mistakes and do some type of work to correct them. I’m sure there’s some type of anti-bullying volunteer work he could have done.
With social media, digital records being saved forever and everyone having a camera in their pocket, there’s no more burying your youthful indiscretions. In this day and age, I think it’s always going to be better to get out in front of a potential scandal than to wait and see if it shows up later down the line.
Not really arguing with you. It’s a fine point in the abstract of how long you can hold something like that against someone. In the real world it takes longer to forget.
I got that, I think we’re on the same side.
Regarding how long you can hold something against someone, that’s why I made the point about Brett Kavanaugh earlier. That if all his alleged indiscretions we’re presented exactly as they were, but it had happened 5 years ago instead of back in college, it would have much more difficult for him to get on to the SC.
Well, they do it because it’s actually a plausible excuse, even if in many cases it’s obvious that it’s a pretense. Politics is a hard grind of continually begging people for money and constantly being on the road, and it does damage family relationship.
His press release was dictated into speech-to-text on his phone. It’s a sentence fragment with typical stream of consciousness word order and any unaccented sounds got turned into lost letters.
He meant: "I promised change now that I cannot now deliver.” (because I just resigned from the campaign. Crocodile tears: Sorry to disappoint everyone who voted for me).
So when you were 6 years old you should have been held responsible for kicking your mother in her stomach when she was pregnant? Ok, that’s kind of absurd. But I don’t think a 19 year old should be held responsible for every action of their’s at age 12, or a 27 year old for everything they did at age 20. Now at age 20 there is legal responsibility, but even then there are plenty of mistakes people can make at that age and even older that can be forgiven in 7 years. There has to be room for reasonable redemption.
But lets also keep in mind what it was that he did. He didn’t just kick his mom in the stomach or get caught shoplifting or even stealing a car. He blackmailed a classmate and then posted nude pictures of her on the internet. These pictures will likely haunt her for the rest of her life. What happens if someday down the line she tries to run for office or becomes a teacher? Someone finding these pictures could very possible ruin that.
It’s difficult, at least for me, to argue that a crime you commit against someone else, that will have lifelong consequences for them, should be brushed under the rug for you as long as some amount of time has passed.