Salt Lake County election more complex this year

There's a lot of politics going on in Utah just 40 days from the 2004 general elections.

But the Salt Lake County Mayor Nancy Workman story is a fascinating one for many people, showing as it does the tough parts of partisan and personal politics.

Workman, now on a paid leave of absence as she fights two felony counts of misuse of public monies, came to the Deseret Morning News' editorial board this week with her attorney, Greg Skordas, and her campaign manager, Chris Bleak, to talk about her troubles and answer questions.

As it so happened, she appeared Wednesday afternoon just after walking out of a live radio interview on KUER, the University of Utah's public radio station. She walked out of the interview, she told the board, because she believed that KUER veteran newsman Doug Fabrizio "was twisting" her answers and his questions were unfair in nature.

So now we can add to her many troubles the fact that she's walking out of live news programs if she doesn't like how the questioning is going. (She did not, by the way, walk out of the newspaper's editorial board meeting — maybe we didn't ask hard enough questions or maybe she didn't have a live radio audience to impress.)

Workman is not anything if not dogged — as her continuing campaign shows.

In the last Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll she got only 12 percent support. Her Democratic opponent, Peter Corroon — basically unknown until Workman's administration started to self-destruct this spring — had 43 percent support. Pollster Dan Jones & Associates found independent Merrill Cook, who is well-known in Utah politics, had 20 percent support.

Yet she maintained again Wednesday that she will not quit the race — which would leave no Republican on the ballot — nor will she seek a doctor's note saying she is disabled and can't continue the race — which would allow Republicans to replace her on the ballot.

She believes — and Skordas nearly guarantees — that she will get a jury trial before the Nov. 2 election. But legal experts say there's likely no way a trial can be set and heard in 40 days.

So Workman is running a very public campaign while at the same time is fighting a criminal case.

Skordas, who knows something about politics — he's the Democratic Party's nominee for Utah attorney general this year — says fighting it out in a court of law and in the court of public opinion at the same time is a very different thing. And the two goals are not always the same.

"Certainly, it helps her (campaign) if we win" in court, he said. But the opposite is not necessarily true, he added.