Soccer Dad

All fired up

Nobody asked him but C Fraser Smith thinks that Michael Steele should forego the run for the Senate because he's not qualified. The big move Smith thinks the Republicans should make is have Chip DiPaula, Gov Ehlrlich's chief of staff run for State Comptroller. Smith's murky reasoning is that Steele has no deliberative experience and is thus unfit to be a senator.
Of course running someone against the former governor, Comptroller Schaeffer will not doubt alienate one of Ehrlich's allies in state government. Smith's advice only makes sense if one is trying to sabatoge the governor. The governor has enough trouble getting through his initiatives with the veto proof Demcoratic majorities in the legislature. It would make no sense to irk Schaeffer.
But I quote this article not because of Smith's intentionally bad advice. I quote it because of what else he writes:

The party ought to think about developing talent it may have overlooked. For example, why not run James C. "Chip" DiPaula Jr. for comptroller? There are a dozen reasons why this idea would make more sense than Steele for Senate.

Mr. DiPaula is more than qualified. If there is one success in the Ehrlich administration so far, it's Mr. DiPaula's management of the numbers. He stepped up and supplied expertise no one thought he or the GOP had. The party had been out of the governor's office for 36 years.

He mastered a $23 billion spending plan overnight. The economy has helped, but he's gotten a staggering deficit into what looks like manageable proportions. The cost in starved programs might not be your cup of tea, but it's been done with efficiency and resolve.

It's passed off as a joke by the governor, but Mr. DiPaula is the star of the Ehrlich administration, eclipsing the governor himself in terms of actually running the state. If Mr. Ehrlich gets re-elected, one of his best arguments will be Mr. DiPaula and fiscal management.

In further validation of his value, the governor has taken him out of the budget office now to make him chief of staff in charge of, everyone assumes, re-election. He's the obvious choice because he's shown an ability to work with Democrats, still an important qualification in a state where most legislators and most voters are registered Democrats.

The obvious seems to have escaped Smith. Perhaps DiPaula's being groomed to take Michael Steele's place as Lieutenant Governor.

Smith does deserve some credit. His praise of DiPaula is uncritical. It's just that his advice about what to do with him stinks. Compare Smith's profile to the Washington Post's news story, "Ehrlich's Closest Aide Now Has The Title. After an intriguing opening paragraph:

When Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. decided to run for governor in 2002, he tapped Chip DiPaula Jr. to manage what seemed a long-shot endeavor. When he took office in 2003, Ehrlich (R) handed DiPaula arguably the administration's most difficult task: digging the state out of a gaping budget hole.

the aritcle does little to tell if DiPaula was successful at his task. (Smith seems to say he was:

He mastered a $23 billion spending plan overnight. The economy has helped, but he's gotten a staggering deficit into what looks like manageable proportions. The cost in starved programs might not be your cup of tea, but it's been done with efficiency and resolve.

)
Most of the rest of the article is filled with digs at Ehrlich:

DiPaula arrives at a time of increasingly frayed relations between the Republican executive branch and the Democrat-dominated legislature. Last week provided several new sources of tension likely to escalate as the election nears.

and backhanded compliments such as:

"DiPaula is clearly in a different universe than most of Ehrlich's staff in terms of talent and political skills," said Del. Peter Franchot (D-Montgomery). "He's got an easy manner, not abrasive or confrontational like so many other folks in the governor's office. . . . That is something you can respect, but it's also something we should defend ourselves from. In the next election, he'd like to take off the heads of the legislators he's been schmoozing with."

Only at the end of the article do we learn:

The same legislators, although certainly not in agreement with all that DiPaula advocates, say they have come to respect his hard work, responsiveness and now-intimate knowledge of the state's $26 billion budget.

But respect and hard work don't answer the question posed at the beginning of the article.
As noted above the Post's story on DiPaula takes cheap shots at Governor Ehrlich including:

Democratic lawmakers launched an investigation into the Ehrlich administration's firing practices, drawing charges of a "witch hunt" from GOP critics. And legislative leaders accused Ehrlich of ignoring several directives they put in the state budget.

This is a reference to the previous day's hit piece on the governor's hiring and firing practics. The National Review's Media Blog rightly criticized the tedentious reporting in the article.
What's astounding about the article is the way it uses laws that prevent officials from talking about firing decisions against the governor. The agencies involved can't say anything so it's the word of the fired employee against the governor.
The math of the reporters leaves something to be desired too. Apparently trying to show Governor Ehrlich in a negative light they wrote:

Maryland's situation is in stark contrast to Virginia's. Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) fired about 40 of 181 political appointees when he took office in 2002, according to Warner's deputy press secretary, Kevin Hall. The rest resigned voluntarily, stayed in place, were replaced by civil service employees or moved to other state jobs, he said.

The Ehrlich administration claims that it fired 284 out of 7000 political appointees; or roughly 4%. (The reporters claim more but give no specific number.) Warner fired roughly 22% of political appointees. Who has been more aggressive in putting his own people in place? Or is it simply that Maryland Democrats just can't stand to have a Republican in the State House.
Meanwhile it's frustrating when Maryland's newspapers sound less like objective muckrakers and more like partisan press releases. No. I'm not exaggerating.
UPDATE: Welcome National Review readers. Thanks to Stephen Spruiell for the link. If you have more interest in the media and Maryland politics I've also written about it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. And go here for the source of the problem.
The Hedgehog Report is politically conservative blog covering Maryland politics.

Posted by SoccerDad at June 21, 2005 01:59 AM | TrackBack