The Bolovschak phenomenon: A nod's still as good as a wink to a blind voter.

Did you know to whom I refer in the title before looking at the photo? Surely she’s the only candidate in recent memory to seek local office sans surname, which points to one of several contradictory aspects of Main Street Bed & Breakfast owner Valla Ann Bolovschak’s bid for an at-large seat on the city council.

Historically, New Albany’s voters have shown considerable reluctance to turn the calendar page forward -- and that's putting it mildly. Surely there have been exceptions (Regina Overton comes immediately to mind), but partisan municipal voters seldom have been keen on Republicans in general, on women running for big ticket offices like mayor or city council, or on people with seemingly unpronounceable “foreign” names – like Bolovschak.

Not unexpectedly, it has been an obvious imperative from the very start that Ms. Bolovschak’s political brand identity must consistently and repetitiously be pegged to her forenames, and moreover, that her fervent GOP leanings in the broader state and national senses be somewhat muted locally in favor of a universal populist message capable of being appreciated by the dull mass of primarily Democratic voters, who otherwise might be frightened even if they’ve bought into her familiar “Jimmy G – You Work for Me” stratagem.

Many of them are going to be surprised on Tuesday when they declare Democratic allegiance and find Ms. Bolovschak’s name missing from the list. Here’s a clue: Think pachyderm, even if it isn’t indicated on the yard signs.

Barely concealed slash ‘n’ burn alliances of purely Machiavellian convenience with nominal Democrats like the Freedom to Screech blog’s cowardly and trognonymous Vicki Denhart have been undertaken with the intent of lowering cultural resistance from older female voters, while at the same time not directly implicating Ms. Bolovschak in the slanderous mayhem foisted on the public by the embittered professorial wannabe.

Of course, we live in a spittle-obsessed America, and photogenic good looks are never a bad strategy to win over undecided and sexually frustrated older males.

Undoubted ability doesn’t hurt, either, and virtually no one – even the author – contests the fact that Ms. Bolovschak possesses reams of useful business experience of the sort generally lacking on the council. She also has useful connections in a state dominated by the Republican Party (see “spittle”, above).

By positioning herself more than three years ago as an entity approximating that of a shadow city government, Ms. Bolovschak has worked behind the scenes on a number of issues, some of broad usefulness to the community in general (railroads and the Greenway – that’s “green-a-way” for those Steve Price voters reading), and others undertaken for puzzlingly less reputable motives (taking a lead role in financing and leading the attempt to scuttle the worthy Linden Meadows low-income home ownership project).

Through it all, I’ve formulated a cautionary dictum: You’re free to take Ms. Bolovschak at face value so long as you understand that there are multiple faces, ones deployed at different times to different people, and for different reasons.

The do-gooder or the narcissist?

The savvy negotiator or the scheming character assassin?

Defender of the downtrodden, or cynical manipulator of the White Castle-eating noodleheads?

She’s been all of these things at various junctures during a carefully orchestrated period of political ascendancy. One must understand from the outset that hers is not a candidacy built for transparency, but rather a Rove-influenced shell game intended to take advantage of what she perceives as weaknesses of perception and intellect on the part of a bickering yokel populace.

Sadly, she may even be right when it come to the latter assessment, with implications even more disturbing than her tactics to date. Indeed, it’s sometimes hard not to admire hardcore realism even as the rancid stench of abhorrent methodology send you running in search of a convenient bucket.

Will Ms. Bolovschak successfully charm the somnolent GOP urban cadres and rise to the top three on the GOP at-large council ballot? It seems like a reasonable prospect, although inexplicable local proclivities for self-defeating xenophobia can never be entirely dismissed.

One thing is clear: Aficionados of governmental gridlock may think that the current council offers the ideal components for a profound lack of progressive movement … but what if Ms. Bolovschak and a handful of newly elected fellow council Republicans face off for four long years against a second-term Mayor James Garner – with obstructionist “Democrats” in tow?

It’s a scenario that would make the siege of Troy seem like an adolescent’s attention span, redolent of the nothingness of wheels spinning in deep mud or the lonesome yelp of starved puppies chained behind slumlord properties.


---


As an addendum, here is a comment previously posted as a comment by reader All4Word on Thursday, May 3.

Ms. Bolovschak continues to boast that she has personally paid for the videography of city council meetings, but something remains unsaid, at least recently.

Upon my earliest acquaintance with the now-candidate, I extracted a pledge from her. That is a pledge that was given, but not fulfilled.

Not everyone in New Albany has cable TV, so even if the school system (the owner of the cable station) were willing to give up part of its educational programming time to government meetings, many still would not be able to access them.

So I asked Ms. Bolovschak to promise that she would deposit copies of the tapes in the public library. She did promise, but she never came through.

It is the height of Rove-ian politicking to boast about privately taping city council meetings without making those tapes available to the public. Much in the same way that she claims to be on the board of Historic Landmarks (we're members, and we can't find any list that includes her), the claim and the underlying truth are at variance.

Indeed, there is a cost to tape the meetings. But there's a cost to driving a Ferrari (or a golf cart), too. But if that Ferrari isn't being driven for the benefit of the public, it hardly counts as a legitimate campaign selling point.

Voters should know that videotaping of city council meetings would not go "poof" if Ms. Bolovschak were to stop taping. Others stand ready to underwrite those costs, but they are committed to making them publicly available, not to secreting them in a boudoir for private viewing.

Thanks to NAC for the recent efforts to bring visual representation to what this blog has been saying for more than three years now. Yesterday the word "unbelievable" was bandied about in regard to the 3rd District candidate forum/debate. Unfortunately, it is all too believable.

Would that those videos were available to all.

Photo credit: B52s