Soccer Dad

A perfect storm for republicans? in maryland?

Two developing stories may play a role in determining the 2006 elections for Governor and Senator in Maryland.

Last month, the Washington Post featured "Steele Factor Looms in Maryland" focusing on Michael Steele's bid for Paul Sarbanes' senate seat next year, though the article notes, generously:

Republicans say his historic status and his use of state office to open a dialogue with minority business executives and church leaders could help draw votes from what is arguably the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency. Another factor is the bitterness that many black leaders have felt since 2002, when Democrats passed up a chance to put a black candidate on the statewide ticket and left it to Republican Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. to end the tradition of all-white slates.

(The Washington Post reported in its dead tree edition but not on its website, that former PG county executive Wayne Curry has been courted by Duncan, O'Malley and Ehrlich. If Ehrlich would replace Steele with Curry - assuming that Curry changes parties - according to this view, that would be a big deal.)

However, the article also notes reality:

In Maryland, Democrats still hold a nearly 2-to-1 edge in party registration and have an overwhelming advantage among blacks, who account for 28 percent of the population -- the highest percentage of any state outside the Deep South. And, they note, Ehrlich and Steele drew fewer votes in Prince George's than did Republican Ellen R. Sauerbrey in 1994 and 1998. Another black Republican who ran statewide, Alan Keyes, failed to gain traction outside GOP strongholds in his 1988 and 1992 Senate bids.

After a number of ugly incidents, including throwing Oreo cookies at Steele during a debate held under the auspices of the NAACP at Morgan State University, Democrats have learned that ugly racial politics can and does work when used against a black Republican.

There are signs that this is starting up again. In a now (in)famous case a blogger doctored a picture of Steele and called him "Sambo." Democrats have disassociated themselves from the blog but haven't been quite so forceful in denouncing it.

Given a chance to criticize the offensive caricature of Steele, Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat went so far as to compare Steele:

to a slave who loves his cruel master or a cookie that is black on the outside and white inside because his conservative political philosophy is, in her view, anti-black.

(It's worth noting that in the above article State Sen Lisa Gladden says that in terms of criticizing Steele " "Party trumps race, especially on the national level..." If she's defending the cartoon then she's defending racism in service of a greater goal. It's not clear from the article if she's talking generally or not. If she is talking generally, she's a hypocrite. In her own case when she successfully ran against State Sen Barbar Hoffman in 2002, Gladden's own campaign deemed race to be more important than politics. JunkYardBlog noted a Gregory Kane column that criticized the antisemitic, racist nature of the Gladden campaign and its supporters. Worse is what the late state delegate Howard "Pete" Rawlings said:

"More important, in a majority-black district, voters want representatives who "look like them, smell like them and think like them," as Rawlings has said.

This sort of vile campaigning works in Maryland and the liberal media don't much seem to mind.)

The other event is the re-emergence of Joseph Steffen. Steffen was an aide to Ehrlich who was forced to resign when it emerged that he had not shut down false rumors that Mayor O'Malley.

He has come up again because of new information possibly implicating a former Democratic party official for having engaged Steffen in the discussions over O'Malley.

But also he has agreed to testify about the firing practices of the Ehrlich administration that has Democrats so exercised. (Keep in mind that Ehrlich retained 96% of the political appointees that he inherited. What exercises Democrats is not that he hired or fired anyone but that he won the election and attained the power to do so in their state.) Based on his talk with WBAL-TV, he says that the firings were based on merit (or lack thereof).

However there's still the matter of the Washington Post and its reporter Matthew Mosk:

Stoltzfus yesterday said he may ask the committee to subpoena records of the Web site where the chats took place, http://freerepublic.com/ , and to subpoena Washington Post reporter Matthew Mosk, who first reported the postings.

R.B. Brenner, The Post's Maryland editor, said: "There is no reason to subpoena Matthew Mosk. We have already reported that we don't know who MD4BUSH is and that the newspaper had no involvement in the postings."

Mosk was given printed copies of the messages in November 2004, Brenner said. Unable to verify their authenticity, the reporter appealed for help and, in January, was given sign-on information to enter the chat room by someone associated with MD4BUSH, he said. The exchanges with Steffen appeared in October and November.

"Given the nature of the postings, we needed to verify that the copies we had been provided were accurate," Brenner said. Mosk later showed printouts to Steffen before the Feb. 9 story was published.

Stoltzfus suggested Mosk's use of the log-in information would constitute an ethical breach if the reporter had used it to communicate with Steffen. Brenner said Mosk simply read the messages and did not post anything on the Web site.

Sorry but that's not the only problem here. Mosk's story was leaked to the O'Malley campaign before it appeared. There was a breach at the Post or there was an improper co-ordination between the Post and the O'Malley campaign. Mosk and the Post need to come clean on this.

More at Postwatch.

UDATE: I had wanted to blog more about this subject, but ran out of time. I inadvertantly came upon this article from May in Baltimore's City Paper while researching this post:

An anonymous letter delivered to City Paper last week accuses WBAL-TV reporter David Collins of plagiarizing The Sun and of misrepresenting information that had been published months earlier in The Washington Post and the Montgomery County Gazette as his own exclusive reporting.
. . .
The anonymous letter to City Paper concludes with a comment suggesting that its author is displeased with the direction of Collins’ recent reporting: “In their inexplicable zeal to do Governor Ehrlich’s and Joe ‘The Prince of Darkness’ Steffen’s dirty work by exposing the Deep Throat who uncovered Ehrlich’s political hit man,” it reads, “WBAL’s ‘I Team’ has plagiarized the work of other journalists.”

So who wrote the letter? My suspicion is that it was a Democrat, likely someone associated with O'Malley. There's been no follow up to this as far as I've seen. But imagine that an anonymous tip impugned the integrity of a reporter looking into Republican shenanigans. Would this story have died? Collins started looking into the identity of MD4BUSH who is/was likely a Democratic operative and someone seeks to discredit him. Whoever would want to do that?

Finally the reason I focused on these two stories is because they illustrate the handicap with which Republican operate in Maryland. Dirty campaign tactics that are effective are used against them without extracting a price. And Republicans cannot usually expect the media to expose the skullduggery of their opponents.

It's tough but Robert Ehrlich beat those odds in 2002. It will be a lot harder in 2006 and for Michael Steele.

Technorati Tags: Rober Ehrlich, Michael Steele, Matthew Mosk, David Collins.