In this week’s column, LL considered how campaigns can market candidates running for attorney general, an office few voters are interested in and one in which candidates can’t really promise to do much once they’re elected. It’s a mark of how constricted the candidates are that LL perked up at a forum earlier this week when Paul Zukerberg promised to beef up the Office of the Attorney General’s IT department.

The campaign for attorney general hopeful Edward “Smitty” Smith, meanwhile, has hit on its own strategy for the race: talking about how he’s from the District, and then talking about it some more. In a mailer sent out yesterday, embedded below, the campaign features a picture of a spunky-looking young Smith and a description of him as a “kid from Anacostia who refused to quit.”

It’s a theme Smith’s campaign isn’t about to drop. They started race by billing him, boxing-promoter style, as “D.C.’s Own.” In another mailer the campaign plans to send out, Smith, surrounded by his baby pictures, touts his education at Harvard but concedes “it’s what I learned in Anacostia who made me who I am.”

Smith has the money to keep his “hometown boy made good” campaign going. As of Aug. 10, Smith had the second-largest war chest, trailing only largely self-funded rival Karl Racine.

[documentcloud url=”https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1305708-smitty-just-a-kid.html”]

[documentcloud url=”https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1305707-smitty-learned-a-lot.html”]
Photo courtesy Smitty for AG campaign