Last week, in this space, I reported that the state Democratic Party was overbilled $50,000 by a small company called Stack of Dimes during the 2004 election. Some of the "inappropriate" checks to Stack of Dimes—as State Party Chair Paul Berendt described the payments—were signed by a top Democratic campaign staffer, who also just happened to be a cofounder of the company. The staffer was one of the few privileged members of the Democrats' local 2004 election team that had check-signing authority during a time when earnest small donors were giving to the party in the hopes of taking down Bush.
The response from blue Seattle to my story about the questionable payments? Dismissive and disdainful.
One reader wrote in to say, "To compare some petty sleight of hand by a staffer with the kind of thing that Duke Cunningham pulled off is laughable."
A local Democratic consultant left me a snippy text message: "Congratulations. I hardly think drawing a parallel between Scooter Libby and [this staffer] is fair, but whatever."
And local partisan liberal blogger David Goldstein (HorsesAss.org) e-mailed: "I don't really see how you equate this to the sort of GOP corruption that is unfolding nationally."
Indeed, I did break the news by couching it in the context of the Republicans' recent ethics scandals. Was I saying that the $50K in checks was equivalent to the handiwork of Randy Duke Cunningham or Scooter Libby? No, I'm not saying the Dem staffer broke any laws. But I cover local politics, and $50,000 is a lot of money for the local Democratic Party.
The news about the $50K came to my attention only a few hours after I had been on the phone with Berendt, when he'd waxed eloquent about the Dems' 2006 campaign theme: "The Republicans' culture of corruption." I couldn't help but see an ironic dissonance between Berendt's sound bite ("The Republicans have given us the opportunity to take the moral high ground") and the fact that he was hushing up a questionable $50,000 "overbilling" by a top D staffer.
Perhaps I did make too much out of the irony, but I can't help thinking no matter how I couched the story, local Dems would have complained. Indeed, Goldstein's e-mail quipped: "I think you overplayed the state Dems' little 'scandal' there;" and the same guy who dinged me for comparing "a petty staffer to Randy Cunningham" also claimed the whole affair wasn't even newsworthy. He wrote: "The Stranger must not be paying attention. Berendt reported this to the Party Executive Committee last fall and to the whole Central Committee."
The Executive Committee and the whole Central Committee? Not the whole Central Committee? I imagine he must be a member of one of those committees. Because the affair remained a secret to the public (and, in turn, to Democratic voters) until I wrote about it last week.
Mainly though, I suspect local Dem leaders didn't want me to write about this, period, and thought I was behaving no better than a biased Republican blogger. Given local Democrats' penchant for circling the wagons around here, I'd suggest that's not such a bad role to play from time to time. On that score I'll give the final word to Goldstein, who—after an e-mail exchange about the column—summed up my argument better than I had: "I suppose I would have blogged on it... if it had happened to the state GOP."
