It's a reflection of either how well Rachel Barnhart is doing or how spiteful Lovely Warren is.
I'm talking about the lawsuit that was announced yesterday.
It means either Barnhart is surging in the polls or Warren is pissed off.
Odds are it's the latter.
Odds are this is a political hatchet job, a weak-tea October surprise in a smalltown mayoral primary.
Here's the background.
Rachel Barnhart threw away a great television news career to make a fool of herself in a series of political campaigns. You'd call it quixotic, except Don Quixote was endearing. At any rate, in her first run, last year for state Assembly, she ran up a $5,000 bill with Arnie Rothschild.
Arnie Rothschild is the monster who lived in your closet when you were a little kid. Every night, when you fell asleep, he tried to eat your brains.
When he wasn't busy doing that, he was engaged in any number of complex, undercover political connivances typically geared toward getting sweetheart advertising business for himself, and advancing his decades-long dream of building a big playhouse for Broadway shows.
He was the guy who made commissions putting Republican-controlled Water Authority ads on Republican-controlled Transit Authority buses encouraging people, I guess, to choose the only water option open to them.
He also is a political adviser and schemer, promoter and advertiser. He is good enough at it to have had his finger in most of the local political pies of his generation, and to have profited thereby. He currently does the advertising for Republicans in the Assembly, something akin to doing brand management for dodo birds.
In his early days, he was rumored to have used the d.b.a. Mephistopheles Inc., but that is unconfirmed.
As a political professional, he last year did a mailing for Rachel Barnhart's Assembly campaign. That tab was just under $5,000. She has not paid it yet.
More about that in a second.
The relationship between Rachel Barnhart and Arnie Rothschild goes back years and has been almost familial. She has been best friends with his daughter. And the person behind Barnhart's campaign -- Robert Scott Gaddy -- stays at Arnie Rothschild's condo when he visits Rochester. To complicate matters more, Gaddy is the political step-brother of Lovely Warren, and -- with Rothschild's help -- got her elected mayor.
And, to double down on complicating matters, Arnie Rothschild -- in his guise as head of the local Broadway-theater group -- has hornswaggled Lovely Warren into backing his plan to build a playhouse where Midtown Plaza used to stand. She is his only hope, and his key to securing some $20 million in state subsidies.
You've got so much mutual back scratching going on here that it makes you dizzy.
Which gets back to the lawsuit.
The filing of this suit three weeks before the mayoral primary between Rachel Barnhart, Lovely Warren and Jim Sheppard is a clear political move by Arnie Rothschild to curry favor with Warren by publicly hurting Barnhart.
Mr. Quid, meet Mr. Quo.
Rachel, you were just thrown under a bus with a water ad on the side.
Of course, Rachel should also pay her debts.
But the reality is that politicians are pretty slow to do so. Many campaigns and candidates will carry debt for years, even when their coffers are full. Arnie Rothschild knows that, he is in that business.
And Arnie Rothschild knows that because he has sometimes been in arrears himself. Mr. Google seems to remember something about Arnie and some money that was owed to the airport and transportation authorities. I think he got spanked by the last county executive once for stuff like that, and got back in her good graces only after agreeing that certain monies went into an account that he couldn't touch.
Sometimes people owe money. It is commonplace for politicians to owe money.
It is rare for them to be sued.
Especially by their lifelong friend.
Unless there's an election afoot and points to be made.
Either she scared them, or she pissed the mayor off.
But either way, this lawsuit is a hatchet job.