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Will Oremus
Posted on Friday, October 06, 2006 - 07:08 am:   

Tuesday Oct 3

Teen aims for state Senate

Unusual campaign focuses on Web

By Will Oremus


An 18-year-old running for state Senate is promising a change from politics as usual, a claim that has so far been borne out by his unorthodox campaign.

Michael Skipakevich's campaign is built on Web pages such as the social networking tool MySpace. He has an attack ad against opponent Leland Yee on the Internet video site YouTube. The local leader of his own party calls him "boastful" and "naive." And his official spokesman is the man he defeated in the June primary election -- a man who also happens to be his boss.

Short on money but full of energy, Skipakevich is banking on grassroots and youth support in his race against Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Leland Yee for Jackie Speier's seat, which covers much of San Mateo County.

A request for an interview was granted Monday, not by the candidate himself but by Oscar Braun, the Coastside community activist and Web developer he beat in the Republican primary. Braun was so impressed with Skipakevich's victory that he hired him as marketing director of Oscar Knows, his online content management business.

"Michael, at 18, is a 21st-century digital candidate," Braun said. The Republican party, he said, "laid out a campaign plan that I think is probably very traditional, and Michael's view and mine was that we felt that our best path was one that was more Internet-based."

Central to the campaign is a Web portal owned by Oscar Knows called letsconnect.tv (http://letsconnect.tv), which integrates Skipakevich's platform of disaster preparedness into an online "desktop" with features like a search function, calendar and chat rooms. The disaster preparedness theme, including a call for San Francisco to pay tens of millions of dollars to protect the Hetch Hetchy water system, is one Braun has been working on for a long time.

"If we have a fire or an earthquake or a terrorist attack, we don't have any backup for the water system," Braun said. He said Skipakevich's plan is to install a high-tech alert system in the county's forests to detect fires and other threats.

The victory in the Republican primary gave Skipakevich the party's nomination by default, contrary to some reports that he lacks the party's endorsement. Still, San Mateo County party chair Karen King said she doesn't plan to mobilize many of the party's resources on his behalf.

"We're not going to bet on a losing horse," King said, adding that Skipakevich's victory over Braun had less to do with his platform than with Braun's baggage as an activist. "That's a point that seems to be lost on both men, frankly."

King said, "Michael Skipakevich has his own view of the world, apparently, and he has not proven himself to be a team player with the local Republican party. He's very boastful, and he has turned off a lot of the voters as well."

Yee himself was less critical, saying, "Any 18-year-old who's willing to go out there and run for office, you've got to give him a lot of credit. I think what he needs to do is sit down and just try to understand the county a little bit better and try to develop a platform that reaches a broader audience."

Skipakevich took some heat in September when it was discovered that he had links to anti-gay groups on his MySpace page. Braun said yesterday that was not Skipakevich's fault. "The MySpace site was not built by Michael; somebody did it for him as a favor. Michael wasn't even aware of the link, and he literally took it down within minutes."

Now the site (http://www.myspace.com/michaelskip) features a YouTube video portraying Yee as beholden to special interests.

Yee said Monday that he planned to run a positive campaign, and said his top priority in the state Senate would be solving the district's problems with affordable housing and traffic.



E-mail Will Oremus at woremus@dailynewsgroup.com

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