Md. Public TV to Show McKay-Dyson Chronicle
By Megan Greenwell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Elizabeth Lewis feared that after she donned her cap and gown, her senior honors project would wind up collecting dust in some dark corner of the college library. A week after she graduated summa cum laude from St. Mary's College of Maryland, nothing could be further from the truth.
Lewis's project, a documentary about Thomas F. McKay's unsuccessful 2006 campaign for the Maryland Senate, has attracted statewide attention from politicians and the media for its portrayal of one of the state's most closely watched races. Next month, "The Close Race That Wasn't Close" will air on Maryland Public Television at 7:30 p.m. June 15, bringing Lewis's chronicle of the McKay campaign to homes across the state.
"What has happened with all the attention was my intention; I wanted a wider audience to see my movie," said Lewis, 21, who is from Elkton, in far northeast Maryland, and majored in economics and political science. "But it's happened on a broader scale than I thought it would, which makes me really happy."
When Lewis began working on the documentary, McKay -- a Republican who was then president of the St. Mary's Board of County Commissioners -- was widely viewed as a formidable opponent to Roy P. Dyson (D), the longtime state senator and former congressman from St. Mary's.
But Dyson won in a landslide, cementing his role as one of Southern Maryland's most formidable political figures. "The Close Race That Wasn't Close" tackles the question of what went wrong for McKay and the numerous high-profile Maryland Republicans who backed him. Republican and Democratic strategists, other politicians and McKay explain what happened in a series of interviews.
After seeing the election results, McKay tells Lewis toward the end of the 35-minute documentary, "I was devastated. I really was." Now, he says, "my frame of mind is starting to level out."
Lewis considers the widespread disillusionment with the war in Iraq and scandals involving high-ranking Republicans, which led to the strong performance of Democrats across the country. But she concludes that national factors had little to do with the outcome of the race. Dyson's skills at grass-roots organizing, combined with his unrivaled name recognition, doomed McKay, she argues.
McKay, in one scene, sitting in his family's newest grocery store, McKay's Food and Drug in Leonardtown, says: "Most people have voted for Roy Dyson 10, 15 times, and I've asked them to say you were wrong and you need to vote another way, and it was just too hard for a lot of people."
Zach P. Messitte, a St. Mary's College political science professor who was Lewis's faculty adviser on the project, said the documentary reinforced in his mind the role that Dyson's decades of representing the area played in his victory. Even in an era of high-tech, big-money campaigning, Messitte said, Dyson's biggest asset was the fact that so many voters knew his name and respected him.
Messitte said he was impressed by Lewis's ability to make an objective documentary about McKay, whom she campaigned for while serving as president of the state federation of college Republicans. Several minutes of the movie are dedicated to the controversy that arose when McKay said he had a college degree that he had not completed, including a clip of then-first lady Kendel Ehrlich introducing McKay as a graduate of the University of Maryland.
"I think that's a very important piece of the history, so it never occurred to me not to include it," Lewis said. "To not include something like that would have been detrimental to the film."
After working on several campaigns for Maryland Republicans and spending hundreds of hours on her documentary, Lewis said she is "a little burned out" from politics. She didn't rule out running for office at some point, but her first stop will be in the nonprofit sector, working for an institute that helps develop political parties and open elections across the world. She will carry the lessons she learned from her senior project into her professional career, she said.
"The most rewarding thing was meeting all of these people I wouldn't have met otherwise," she said. "It was really nice to get to know people from both sides of the aisle. People think everyone in politics hates each other, but that's really not true."
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