When the ‘smell of politics’ serves public better than public servants

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE

Associate Editor

A WEEK AND a half before the 1990 election, two legislators called a news conference to make explosive allegations: Top Education Department officials had pressured a school bus maker to overcharge the state for parts so it could funnel the money back into fishing trips and other favors for those officials.

The lawmakers produced court documents to back their claims that officials put “unrelenting pressure on bus vendors to cough up fun money for Charlie Williams’ cronies.”

Mr. Williams, who had led the Education Department for 12 years, accused the legislators of “deliberately misleading demagoguery” and denounced their allegations as a “political smoke screen” to aid his challenger.

Almost a week ago, Richard Eckstrom’s campaign greeted news that the comptroller general and his family had taken a state car on a 3,600-mile spin to Minnesota by charging that challenger Drew Theodore was trying “to divert attention away from Republican Richard Eckstrom’s outstanding record of standing up for the taxpayers.”

That sort of blame-the-whistleblower response is standard fare, I suppose.

What’s not standard fare is for it to be echoed, at least implicitly, by the governor, who has been even more outspoken than his pal Mr. Eckstrom about this sort of abuse. Gov. Mark Sanford’s spokesman did say the governor would be glad to “consider” tighter regulations on the use of state vehicles, but then he added, “It’s a shame that the timing smells of politics.”

And that’s because ... why?

When did the source of information become more important than the information itself, the motives of the informant more important than the misdeeds of the informee?

You know what? I think it’s a shame that Mr. Eckstrom’s Great Adventure on the public dole came to light in the context of a campaign, too.

I wish the state employee or employees who tipped off Mr. Theodore had had enough confidence in the integrity of our government to blow the whistle two years ago, when this happened.

Better still, I wish Mr. Eckstrom had had enough integrity to limit his use of public property to official business. My goodness, I never would have expected this from Mr. Eckstrom, whom I first met back when he was a member of the state Mental Health Commission attacking the agency’s practice of providing a 4,900-square-foot house for the agency director to live in free of charge.

Yet here we are, with one of the clearest cases of petty, personal abuse of power that I’ve seen since then-Sen. Jack Lindsay got caught flying the state airplane to the Super Bowl.

And apparently we never would have found out about it if not for the smell of politics.

Within days after legislators uncovered the school bus scandal back in 1990, SLED and the FBI announced they were investigating the allegations, and Mr. Williams took a lie detector test to prove he had not known about the slush fund. He reneged on his promise to release the results.

Barbara Nielsen cruised to a jaw-dropping 57-43 percent victory to claim the first down-ballot statewide victory for the Republicans since Reconstruction.

Two years later, a top department official pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges.

Political motivations often lead to irrelevant and irresponsible charges — not to mention bad law. That’s one reason so-called negative campaigning gets a bad rap.

Negative campaigning doesn’t have to mean misrepresentation, though. It can also mean pointing out really bad stuff your opponent really did do, and really shouldn’t have done. When that is the product of political motivations, it can serve the public well.

The really bad stuff can range from voting the wrong way in the voters’ view — not supporting the schools, or supporting them too much, for instance — to actually abusing the position.

Barbara Nielsen’s 1990 upset has this in common with Drew Theodore’s would-be upset: Both used whistleblowers to uncover abuse that the incumbent would have to answer for.

The abuse at the Education Department was far more egregious than Mr. Eckstrom’s abuse; but then, the incumbent himself wasn’t alleged to have been personally involved in that earlier case. Both cases, though, involve wrongdoing that the public might never have found out about absent motivated political opponents who had the time and resources to dig into whispers of abuse and then hammer them in public.

We’d all be better off if our elected officials kept their noses — and the noses of their subordinates — clean. But they’re human, which means some of them won’t. Aggressive election campaigns give us a chance to right that — and sometimes, they’re the only way we even find out about problems to start with.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.