On the menu today: The 21-count federal indictment against former Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum offers a hard lesson not just for those on the left in the Sunshine State, but for every voter. Separately, a new poll in Pennsylvania affirms Dr. Mehmet Oz’s status as the Ford Pinto of the 2022 GOP fleet of Senate candidates.
The Andrew Gillum Lesson
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled a 21-count federal indictment against Andrew Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee and the former Democratic nominee for governor in 2018, alleging wire fraud, related conspiracy charges, and making false statements.
It’s not the biggest story of the week, but it does have an intriguing and revealing wrinkle. The DOJ contends that, “Between 2016 and 2019, defendants Gillum and Lettman-Hicks conspired to commit wire fraud, by unlawfully soliciting and obtaining funds from various entities and individuals through false and fraudulent promises and representations that the funds would be used for a legitimate purpose.”
(Marc Caputo’s scoop over at NBC News includes the paragraph, “The indictment marks a new low for Gillum, a married father of three who withdrew from public life as a political leader and a paid CNN commentator after a March 2020 sex scandal involving a suspected male overdose victim in a hotel in the South Beach neighborhood of Miami Beach.” Are we sure this is really a new low? Because that previous low was pretty darn low.)
On or about June 14, 2017, Gillum voluntarily agreed to speak to FBI agents. During the investigation, Gillum falsely represented that Southern Pines representatives never offered Gillum anything or gave to Gillum anything, and that Gillum stopped having communications with Southern Pines representatives about the campaign contributions following their attempt to link the campaign contributions to support for potential projects in Tallahassee.
As Peter Schorsch, the publisher of FloridaPolitics.com, succinctly summarized, “Andrew Gillum KNEW in June of 2017 — more than a year before the Florida primary and general election — that he was under federal investigation; Gillum knew he had lied to those investigators. He still ran.”
Yesterday, many observers of Florida politics and national politics marveled at how different the state would be if Gillum had won the governorship by a narrow margin over Ron DeSantis, instead of the other way around. Certainly, Florida’s policies during the pandemic would have been dramatically different, DeSantis would not be a top-tier 2024 Republican presidential contender, the Disney corporation would be happier, and, who knows, maybe Joe Biden would have considered Gillum as a running-mate option.
But Gillum’s jaw-dropping decision to run for governor, while knowing he was being investigated by the FBI and likely to be indicted someday, reveals a difficult lesson that everyone interested in politics should heed, and the Florida Democratic Party should have installed on a giant flashing neon sign in its headquarters.
That lesson is, “Don’t fall in love with candidates you’ve just met.”
Do your due diligence. Recognize that no candidate for office walks on water. You’re hiring a contractor for a multi-year deal, not welcoming a messiah.
Way back in June 2017, the U.S Department of Justice and the FBI issued subpoenas to the city of Tallahassee and the Tallahassee Community Redevelopment Agency, and one of the subpoenas was for all emails and documents of Adam Corey the former campaign treasurer for Gillum. This was not a secret; this was in the local news. The Tallahassee Democrat newspaper and other regional news sources reported on a wide-ranging FBI investigation into corruption in city politics throughout 2017 and 2018. Just how likely was it that a wide-ranging probe into city-government corruption that targeted the mayor’s former campaign treasurer was not going to ensnare the mayor in some way? Gillum was close friends with, and had gone on vacations with, developers who had business before the city council. The spin from the Gillum campaign was, “no city business was discussed and the mayor paid for all of he and Mrs. Gillum’s expenses, including food and drink, and his portion of the villa.”
Florida’s Democratic primary that year wasn’t held until August 28. There were six other Democrats on the ballot, including former state representative Gwen Graham, the daughter of the former governor and senator Bob Graham.
Sunshine State Democrats had other options; they chose the guy with a giant cloud over his head because he gave them the old Barack Obama excitement — young, black, and progressive.
Then, as the FBI probe became an issue in the gubernatorial race, the Gillum campaign’s spin was: “Mayor Gillum is not a subject of the FBI investigation, and he’s committed to rooting out any corruption or wrongdoing in Tallahassee,” said Geoff Burgan, Gillum’s spokesman. “We’re not going to take ethics lectures from Congressman Ron DeSantis, who is marching in lockstep with the most morally, ethically and legally challenged President in American history.”
Any time a guy on your side tries to deflect from accusations of corruption by pointing to the other side’s corruption, the needle on your B.S. detector should move a little. Remember when Harvey Weinstein’s response to the giant #MeToo exposé was how he was just a guy who “came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different” and how, “I am going to need a place to channel that anger so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party”? One of the quickest and easiest defenses of a guilty guy trying to wiggle off the hook is to say, “Stop looking at what looks like corruption around me and look at the corruption over there!”
Despite my seeming cynicism, I do believe that good, smart, honest, and capable Americans are out there, and every cycle, some of them choose to run for office and some of them win. The problem is that every cycle, a whole bunch of unhinged narcissistic maniacs run for public office, too.
Candidates for higher office hate the media, large and small, digging into their background. But there’s a reason we in the news business do this, or why we’re supposed to do this: Lots of people who choose to run for higher office are bad people! Or if they’re not bad, they have some sort of past decisions or actions that would make voters a bit more wary of them. Elected office is power, and it’s not just good and upstanding people who want power.
Every political campaign is attempting to sell the public an idealized and ultimately false image. The job of the media is to show voters the reality, so they can make an informed decision at the ballot box. If you want to elect a candidate with shady business associates, go ahead. If you want to elect a candidate whose womanizing makes Wilt Chamberlain look like a chaste monk, go ahead. Just know what you’re getting and accept the consequences.
We can rightfully complain that large swaths of the national media aren’t that interested in digging into the backgrounds of Democratic candidates. Every cycle or so, I write about Great Southern Democratic Hopes, the longshot Democrats running for statewide office in red states, whom the national media become convinced will pull off an amazing upset — Alison Lundergan Grimes, Beto O’Rourke, Jaime Harrison. (Credit where it’s due, Jon Ossoff did eventually win in Georgia, although in some pretty unusual circumstances.) Andrew Gillum was a variation of that species — one where both the state and national media had a difficult time seeing anything beyond what they wanted to see: A young, black, progressive rising star who was going to turn a long-time swing state blue.
On paper, these longstanding media reflexes are a disadvantage for Republicans, but I wonder if tougher media scrutiny is an advantage for the GOP over the long run. Corruption, bad behavior, self-absorption, and sleaze are human flaws, not a partisan phenomenon.
If a Republican candidate for office has skeletons in his closet, the media are going to sniff them out and run the story on the front page. It may well be that this “expose the Republican scandals” reflex has run amok; this is how we end up with a New York Times exposé on the speeding tickets of Marco Rubio and his wife. And if members of the media wonder why Donald Trump’s sordid past, shady business practices, and various other scandals didn’t derail his 2016 bid, maybe that was because large swaths of the electorate just tuned it out after a while.
But think about how often Democrats have belatedly realized that one of their favorite elected officials or rising stars has turned out to be a sleazy maniac, just in recent years: Andrew Cuomo, Michael Avenatti, Al Franken, Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, Eric Schneiderman. Again, the point there is not that Democrats alone have sleazy maniacs. It’s that, in terms of media coverage, Democratic sleazy maniacs usually have the wind at their back, while Republican sleazy maniacs are sailing into the wind.
Finally, it is worth noting that Gillum released a statement yesterday: “I have spent the last 20 years of my life in public service and continue to fight for the people. Every campaign I’ve run has been done with integrity. Make no mistake that this case is not legal, it is political. Throughout my career I have always stood up for the people of Florida and have spoken truth to power.”
As Charlie Cooke observes, “The idea that the case against him is ‘political’ seems silly on its face. Gillum, you will note, is not being prosecuted by the State of Florida, but by the federal government. So where’s the motive? Gillum mentions his ‘campaigns.’ But he’s a Democrat, like the president, and his most recent opponent was Ron DeSantis, whom the president loathes.”
Another hard lesson that everyone should heed: Guys who are guilty as sin often like to claim that the accusations against them are just a partisan witch hunt. You know, like the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that made it look like Bill Clinton was having an affair with an intern.
ADDENDUM: I suppose the new poll showing Dr. Mehmet Oz trailing Democrat John Fetterman by six points is better than the previous one showing him trailing Fetterman by nine points. But keep in mind, no one has seen Fetterman in public since May 13 because he’s recovering from a stroke that turned out to be much more serious than it was initially described.
Oz remains the wildly underperforming Ford Pinto of Republican Senate candidates, struggling with 63 percent of Pennsylvanians feeling unfavorable to him. And this is in a survey that is otherwise terrible for Democrats. Biden’s job approval in the Keystone State is down to 36 percent (!); 84 percent of respondents think the country is on the wrong track; Republicans lead the generic congressional ballot 47 percent to 45 percent; and state senator Doug Mastriano, who’s basically running on the message that the 2020 campaign was stolen from Trump, is just three percentage points behind state attorney general Josh Shapiro in the governor’s race. And this is a seat that Republicans currently hold, with the retiring Pat Toomey! Yes, it could still change, but right now it looks like Pennsylvania Republicans just gave away this Senate seat by nominating Oz.
By the way, if Donald Trump hadn’t endorsed Oz, do you think Oprah’s doctor still would have won the primary? I doubt it.