Editorial: New Lytle controversy may be the last straw

One goes directly to her credibility and the other to her ethics -- and both are serious enough to potentially kill her chances for re-election.

Lytle was already heading into this fall's campaign with a multi-year trail of controversy relating to her repeatedly divisive, destructive and ill-considered behavior on the council, masked by sugar-coated words and outright disinformation when called on her actions.

The Weekly endorsed Lytle in the 1999 election because of the seeming quality of her ideas and her depth of experience as a former chief planning officer in Palo Alto.

But behavior speaks louder than credentials, and despite the near-fanaticism of some supporters there has been a longstanding pattern of actions that has negated any positives she brought to the council, glaringly visible to any independent observer.

In the latest incident, the disclosure of an e-mail she sent to City Attorney Ariel Calonne June 29 clearly shows she, and possibly Cordell, intentionally misled the public into thinking the two were not working in tandem to run for City Council this November.

The e-mail also reveals shockingly inappropriate political pressure on Calonne at a time when he was in the throes of deciding whether to accept the city attorney post in Boulder, Colo. The e-mail in candied words warned Calonne that if he decided to remain in Palo Alto he might well have both Lytle and Cordell to deal with, in addition to Lytle's allies of the last two years, Hillary Freeman and Yoriko Kishimoto.

"LaDoris Cordell has agreed to run with me," Lytle elaborated in the June 29 e-mail, which she -- inappropriately -- labeled a "private confidential personnel matter." Political candidacies hardly qualify as personnel matters.

Moreover, she wrote, "L. Cordell and I want to keep our candidacy private until we have a chance to strategize over the next few weeks. I am letting you know due to your upcoming option with Boulder but have told only a handful of insiders. Seems like you deserve to know all the factors at play in PA when you go to make your decisions."

Lytle now says she didn't say what the e-mail said -- just that she and Cordell would be running independent campaigns in the same election. Both Cordell and Lytle strongly emphasized their independent candidacies when they publicly announced their decisions to run in mid-July, more than two weeks after Lytle's "I will run" e-mail to Calonne and two weeks before that e-mail was made public.

Cordell, a former Superior Court judge now serving as an assistant provost at Stanford University, has suffered a major blow to her own credibility and perceived integrity from this incident. Her attendance at a campaign-launch barbecue at Lytle's home in mid-July merely adds to the body of circumstantial evidence pointing toward a close coordination of campaigns if not a single stealth campaign.

Furthermore, Freeman's campaign two years ago -- in which she repeatedly declared she was "not a clone of Nancy" as she sought support from community leaders and the Weekly -- now smacks more of precedent than coincidence. Her track record, despite some divergent positions, has shown her to be as close politically to Lytle as possible and still have a separate vote.

Cordell will have a hard time overcoming that legacy.

The truly sad part of all this is that Lytle's energy, ideas and commitment could have been a positive contribution to a City Council that sometimes in the latter 1990s was adrift and in danger of stagnating in its own smugness. Yet her repeated attempts (and successes) to control, manipulate, embarrass and blindside her colleagues have destroyed any semblance of trust most other council members may once have had for her -- even though most have been too politically timid to call her on her behavior directly and publicly.

The upcoming election may well put to the test the famous aphorism attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."

Even, perhaps, in Palo Alto politics.