First, a disclaimer: Drinking Liberally does not endorse candidates or issues, and nothing in my posts should be interpreted to be a Drinking Liberally position.

Is it just me, or does it really seem that Dave Buhler is trying hard to bait Ralph Becker? It seems like every time I open the newspaper I see another headline where Buhler is attacking Becker for one thing or another, and each time Becker comes out looking like the bigger man because he always brushes it off and doesn’t take the bait.

If you’ve met Ralph, you know this is very much part of his character. It’s not that he’s a wimp, he probably just realizes these petty little jabs won’t amount to anything in the end. Buhler is grasping at straws, and Becker refuses to be pulled into the dirty campaigning that Buhler seems to want.

Buhler runs as the “reasonable” candidate, and I’ve got to say that after seeing him in one of the Mayoral debates at Westminster, I left thinking that maybe he wasn’t all that bad. Sure, he didn’t even answer our request to speak at Drinking Liberally (the only candidate at the time that didn’t come out), but after hearing him at the debate I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I still won’t vote for him because there are too many things for which I disagree with him. Lately however, he doesn’t seem to be the “reasonable” candidate. Reasonable would be standing on your own record and credentials. Reasonable is not trying to pull someone else down.

One of my favorite things to read in the Tribune has been this: