We have watched with concern and chagrin during this campaign as DeAngelo repeatedly has demonstrated blatant duplicity in dealing with north Brevard voters. His campaign style is not hard to understand when one considers where he got much of his political training. According to Federal Election Commission records, he worked from July 1981 until February 1982 for the National Conservative Political Action Committee in Washington.

This group, nicknamed Nickpack and headed by a young man named Terry Dolan, was known in the early 1980s for such distasteful methods of negative campaigning that it drew the enmity of the Reagan White House.

John Cartright, former publisher of the defunct weekly Titusville Monitor, said DeAngelo often “bragged to me about the dirty tricks he pulled with Nickpack.”

DeAngelo denied this. “I handled public relations,” he said. “I was not involved in anything like that. And we didn’t do dirty tricks.” He acknowledged that Nickpack’s forte was negative campaigning.

DeAngelo’s tenure with Nickpack came to an end, according to an article in The Village Voice weekly in New York City, after he told a reporter for The Advocate, a gay newspaper, that Dolan would be willing to go on the record as being opposed to federal legislation discriminating against homosexuals.

The reporter, Larry Bush, wrote: “Dolan’s press secretary, Steve DeAngelo, was wildly enthusiastic about the idea. I was immediately plied with stories about the discomfort Dolan had with the Moral Majority over the anti-gay campaign . . .

“Shortly before I was to interview Dolan, I called to reconfirm the appointment and was told by Dolan’s secretary that DeAngelo was unavailable because he was cleaning out his desk after a swift decision that he should look for other work.” Nickpack lost much of its influence after Dolan died from complications of AIDS in 1986.

North Brevard voters have a right to expect truth and honesty from their candidates. They deserve better than DeAngelo’s sorry brand of campaign ethics.