Last week’s scandal, wherein an endorsed Republican
candidate for Methacton School Board, Scott Misus, posted offensive comments on
a public social media site, became a cautionary tale and living example of this
important lesson. The Misus situation has made what one posts online relevant, and
in an era of lazy and low-information voters, vividly illustrates how unwillingness
to do one’s own research on candidates and to allow others to do your thinking for
you can have serious consequences.
Political parties have their own agendas and tend to be run
by people who like to play kingmaker for their own reasons, and since most people aren’t privy to insider
info about the personalities, alliances and agendas, reliance on their opinions
should be viewed as no more than a starting point; a guideline, not gospel.
And don't bank on the press to do meaningful vetting for you, either. The days of investigative reporters are largely gone, and very small budgets at most media outlets means they primarily publish little more than press releases.
Misus, who was jointly endorsed by the two Republican
committees in Methacton School District (LP and Worcester; school board candidates cross file, and evidently the LP
Dems decided not to endorse at all), has been dealt with by party leadership
and officially stripped of his endorsement. While it’s too late to have his
name removed from voting machines, he will not be advocated as a candidate on
Election Day. At considerable expense, party sample ballots were pulled and
reprinted without his name on them. His name was painstakingly removed from
yard signs on which he appeared. The
viewpoints he expressed are not shared by the members of the local party or the other endorsed candidates.
Absolutely, I think we should have done a better job of vetting our
candidates. Court records were scrutinized but we should have gone further. All
candidates were asked at the endorsement meeting whether there was any
information about themselves that could embarrass the party, and Misus either
forgot about these Facebook posts or didn’t see a problem with them, as they
were not mentioned.
But that’s typical and not a good way to vet candidates unless
you already know the answer and are verifying a candidate’s honesty. Candidates
often lie or mislead. They forget, hedge, hide, engage in wishful thinking, and
understandably try to put the best face on things. A good vetting process is
systematic and ideally discovers both the strengths and weaknesses of
candidates before offering them assistance or support. You can’t rely only on what a candidate
tells you.
However, even when one DOES know of adverse information that
defies explanation, sometimes parties move forward with a candidate anyway. That’s
when doing your own research is most valuable.
This is not just an indictment of the GOP. The local
Democrat party has had their missteps too.
For example, back in 2009 one of my coworkers was a LP Democrat
committeeman who excitedly bragged to me one day that his party was going to put up
as a township supervisor candidate a 'dynamic woman who was new to Lower
Providence but not new to politics’.
I was intrigued because I was working on a campaign to elect
the then-incumbent supervisor, so as soon I learned the name, I researched this
woman and discovered that she was a notorious con artist who had been at the
heart of a 2002-2003 scandal in Philadelphia wherein she pretended to be an
heiress descended from a Revolutionary war hero, ingratiated herself into
Philly high society, and used this persona to swindle a wealthy Philadelphia
real estate broker out of more than $80,000 in cash and thousands more in the
form of goods and services from others. She was so notorious that a couple of
crime shows had done episodes about her. (See a good summary, here; this woman, who has since remarried,
moved out of Lower Providence last year as the result of a foreclosure, so
apparently her money management problems continue to this day. She still has an active court docket with Montgomery County as she's still paying restitution).
Anyway, I passed this information onto county GOP party leadership,
who took it to Democrat party leadership, who then presented it to the candidate
and asked her whether this information was true. She quietly withdrew and nobody was publicly embarrassed.
Perhaps, like the “CARE” parents, we should have just
shopped the story around to the local news media for maximum exposure and
humiliation instead of handling it in a gentlemanly manner and giving the party the opportunity to address it first.
The lesson is, if a party doesn’t do a good job vetting
candidates these days, when it’s easier than ever via the Internet, the
opposition (and/or public) most certainly will. It’s not called ‘opposition research’ for
nothing.
While the Worcester Republican Committee (via
Worcesterpapolitics.com) apparently was quick to blame Lower Providence’s
Republican Party for the Misus debacle, the offensive Facebook posts were never
presented by their municipal leader,
Wini Hayes, during the leadup to the joint school board endorsement meeting (or
at the actual meeting) as a reason why we should not endorse Mr. Misus, even
though Ms. Hayes took the lead on questioning candidates and asked each of them
about the existence of unflattering or adverse information.
Given how WRC has positioned themselves (via their friends
at Worcesterpapolitics.com) as somehow innocent in this, you can imagine how
surprised I was to discover something that apparently escaped WRC six years
ago when it endorsed current supervisor Susan Caughlan, and earlier this year
when they re-endorsed her for re-election.
Ms. Caughlan (also known as Mrs. David Brooks, whom I’ve
written about previously), an attorney, wrote and published an article for
the William and Mary Law Review in 1987 that
defended the in-home possession and viewing of child pornography as a protected
First Amendment right [you can read her argument yourself here]. This was not a random class assignment she
was forced to write, it was an analysis she chose to make, write and publish.
I’m not sure how one can defend the creation or mere existence
of, let alone the private possession, viewing and sharing of, child pornography
anywhere, anyplace, anytime, but this woman evidently feels the framers of the
Constitution envisioned this as a protected, God-given right more than two
hundred years ago - as long as it occurs in the privacy of your home, of course, if I read this correctly - and attached her name to this garbage. As a Republican, as an
American, as a parent, as a human, it disgusts me that WRC would hold up
someone with these reprehensible views and endorse them as some sort of exemplary
representative of our values, no matter when she wrote it.
In the event that Caughlan belatedly defends writing this as
some sort of youth-inspired insanity, it gets worse. In the “You can tell a lot
about a person by the company they keep” department, I’m told she’s had a long friendship
and association with recently convicted child porn purveyor (and Worcester Twp resident)
John Harris. This friendship is shady especially when you consider that he has
reportedly endorsed her in the past, donated money to her campaign, and records show she
voted to spend in the neighborhood of
$200,000 of Worcester Township taxpayer dollars protecting his emails from
discovery in a Right-To-Know case (Worcester didn't have an email system of their own at the time and now, of course, we know what kind of things were lurking in his email). And, incidentally, she’s also voted to spend
taxpayer resources to battle Methacton School District in efforts to delay and
restrict the installation of field lights at Methacton’s football field in an effort to prevent them from
impacting nearby residents, which includes and benefits Harris, among other things.
This friendship/association is common knowledge in and around
Worcester, so why, again, was she ever endorsed? Was SHE vetted? As I mentioned
above, WRC chair Wini Hayes asked Methacton school board candidates seeking a
party endorsement this year if there was anything negative about themselves
that they needed to explain; did she ask Caughlan the same thing at their
meeting to endorse a supervisor candidate? And if so, did Caughlan ever tell
WRC about this plank in her ‘conservative’ platform?
Is it any wonder, then, that the fastest growing voter
identity group is “independent” and that increasingly, voters look with more
favor upon UNendorsed candidates?
Political parties are made up of imperfect humans who
despite the best of intentions, sometimes get it wrong. Voters have a wealth of
free information easily available to them to determine who a candidate really
is, what he/she is really about, and whether a candidate resonates with their
values. The fact that so many have voter
apathy and abdicate the vetting responsibility to others lends validity to the
saying ‘you get the government you deserve”.
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