A political prosecution in Ohio? NYT doesn't ask.
Today's New York Times carries a story in it's "politics" section that raised red flags in my mind, but apparently not in reporter Christopher Maag's... The title alone, "Inquiry in Ohio Could Hurt Obama Vote," might seem to suggest a political motivation for the inquiry, and the details of the story only heighten the question of whether the inquiry might be politically motivated--the inquiry targets the top Democratic Party members in Cuyahoga County, the most populous and Democratic-leaning county in Ohio.
To be sure, the reporter dances around the issue:
Cuyahoga County is the most populous and Democratic-leaning county in Ohio. In one Congressional district in the county, John Kerry won 81 percent of the vote in 2004. But even that large margin of victory could not overcome strong Republican majorities elsewhere in Ohio. President Bush won the state that year by about 118,000 votes out of 5.6 million cast.
“Kerry won big in Cuyahoga County, but it wasn’t enough,” said David B. Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron. “Which means Obama needs to win even bigger.”
That may prove difficult with top leaders of the local Democratic Party under investigation. Over three decades in public office, Mr. Dimora has built a broad political coalition, with many allies working as ward leaders, City Council members and mayors across the county.
[...]
Meanwhile, Republicans see the investigation as an opportunity to narrow the Democratic Party’s traditionally large majorities in the area.
“The backbone of their operation is being taken out because so many of their volunteers are public officials and public employees,” said Jim Trakas, the former chairman of the Cuyahoga County Republican Party, who is running against Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, a Democrat. “That will make it very difficult for them to campaign.”
But the reporter not only doesn't ask the question "Is this political?", he doesn't even note the implications, nor the history of politicized prosections we've been hearing about for more than two years. Granted, those stories involved the U.S. Attorneys appointed by Bush, and this involves the F.B.I. and I.R.S., but still, that history would seem relevant to a story about investigtation of top Democratic Party members in a county important to--some would say crucial to--the Democratic nominee's chances in that state.
Perhaps the NYT's reporters need a little help in dot-connecting? They seem unable to do so on their own. What do you think?
OH! My kingdom for a preview function! Sorry about the formatting errors...
August 10, 2008 2:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
You know, I thought immediately about the political angle when these raids happened. But two things:
1) The timing *might* be political, but the substance probably isn't. But then, I'm a highly partisan Democrat in Cleveland who refuses to vote for Jimmy Dimora. I can't speak about the truth of the accusations, but I can say I was entirely unsurprised.
2) I'm not sure that Obama's going to be hurt much here. I think that's mostly part of the press's current everything-is-bad-for-Obama meme. There's enormous enthusiasm for Obama here, much much more than there was for Kerry (I saw someone wearing a non-campaign-issue Obama T-shirt the other day), and there's plenty of time for the Obama campaign to build its own GOTV operation here. They might do it better than Dimora would.
And anyway, if Kerry's problem is that he won big in Cuyahoga but lost the rest of the state, the key for Obama is not to win Cuyahoga even bigger.
August 10, 2008 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, Thank you for chiming in! I'd hoped an Ohioan would stop by and give us the scoop--or at least a ground-level perspective on the investigation.
So you're saying there may be some fire under the smoke? Even so, it sounds like these people have been around, and doing whatever they're doing, for a long, long time. Curious that the FBI/IRS just noticed it in the past month, no?.
August 10, 2008 3:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
There may absolutely be fire under the smoke. There may even be molten lava down there. At best, DiMora and Russo are running an old-fashioned urban patronage machine, full of relatives and cronies on the public payroll. That itself is not exactly illegal. But it's all too common for machines like this, built upon trading favors and mutual back-scratching, to wander into more blatantly illegal favors.
As far as the actual charges being developed, I only know what I see in the papers, and cannot attest any firsthand knowledge. But some of the alleged evidence looks damning, superficially.
As for the timing, I can't tell. Law enforcement does work on its own timetable, political meddling aside. Someone complains to the authorities, or someone solicits a bribe too clumsily, and the digging starts. If these figures weren't indicted earlier, it may well be that they hadn't slipped up, or that they've gotten greedier and more careless over time.
One of the problems of the DOJ scandal is that it puts even legitimate public corruption inquiries under suspicion. But we can't let public corruption off the hook, even if it's by the party that's out of the White House. It's a violation of the public trust, and an attack on democracy, to use the Justice Department to selectively prosecute the opposition. But it's not healthy or democratic to demand that your own guys get a free pass, or presume that they're being railroaded.
Look, DiMora and Russo got raided the same day that Ted Stevens got indicted, on similar charges. (DiMora and Russo, like Stevens, allegedly accepted illegal gifts in the form of free construction work on their homes.) If I had my way, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans would be able to get away with this nonsense, and the smart thing is for the Democrats to take a stand against public corruption.
August 10, 2008 6:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
I removed the NY Times politics section from my bookmarks...it's been weeks since I saw a post of any interest.
August 10, 2008 7:15 PM | Reply | Permalink