George Beier ran against incumbent Kriss Worthington in the November, 2006 election for the District 7 City Council seat.  Though O’Malley had never met Beier, she lambasted him without mercy in issue after issue of the paper leading up the election.  His crime, of all things, was to be modestly wealthy.  O’Malley believed that Beier was buying the election.  Take for example, this piece of post-election crowing (November 10, 2006):

And speaking of nasty attacks, let’s hear it at home for Berkeley Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who survived having a mountain of money and a pack of lies dropped on his campaign for re-election. His opponent, George Beier, who tried on the roles of Mr. Clean and Superman in a couple of his many campaign mailers, ended up being stuck with the Daddy Warbucks image. The bagmen and bagladies at the Chamber of Commerce PAC put expenditures on his behalf over the $100,000 mark, an obscene amount in a council election, particularly when a lot of it was spent with the Chamber’s non-union Carlsbad mailing house instead of with local Berkeley printers.

This is one of O’Malley’s oddest assertions, possibly a type of psychological projection, since she herself is the one person who has most influenced Berkeley’s politics with her money.  Her anti-Beier campaign, for example, was worth much more in advertising dollars to O’Malley favorite, Kriss Worthington, than anything that Beier could have spent. 

But here is the real scandal, if it is true.  The Berkeley Daily Planet has never been home delivered, except when it was once home delivered, but only to George Beier’s district, and only on those days just before the 2006 election when the Berkeley Daily Planet contained scathing denunciations of Beier.   We have heard this from one reliable source, O’Malley has declined to deny the story when put to her, and Berkeley Daily Planet reporter, Richard Brenneman, has told us that it is the paper’s official position to neither confirm nor deny this story. 

Thanks to O’Malley’s shenanigans, Beier lost by less than 200 votes.