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A Bonusgate doc, and a 7th District self-appraisal

Loyal readers will surely remember our coverage of Republican Pat Meehan’s June news conference in Harrisburg, when the 7th District congressional candidate said he’d call into question his opponent’s “fitness” for office but then mostly rehashed old Bonusgate info.

We got some flak at the time, not surprisingly so. But we made one important promise: The Meehan campaign referenced a court document as evidence to back up its claims that Lentz was a “key beneficiary” of the legislative corruption scandal, and pa2010.com committed itself to “independently assess the full document.”

Well, thanks to a very helpful Judge Richard Lewis, yours truly recently made a trip to Harrisburg to give the document a look at the Dauphin County Courthouse. What I learned confirmed pretty much what I had expected: Team Meehan had its facts right, but the larger context was still, to put it generously, very incomplete.

More than two-dozen staffers of the state House Democratic Caucus did indeed do some work on behalf of Lentz’s election to the state House in 2006. The vast majority worked on the campaign for only one day, after Lentz won an online contest to receive a “campaign invasion” of volunteers for a day of canvassing. Others did research from within the Capitol on behalf of the party’s House campaign committee. Only one could possibly be called a “Lentz staffer” by any stretch.

Here’s the important point: The Meehan campaign’s attack hinged on a fundamentally flawed understanding of what Bonusgate actually was. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake that my coverage focused more on their rhetorical overreach and less on this dynamic.

Yes, Lentz benefited from Bonusgate. But according to the documentation I saw, more than two-dozen state House candidates across Pennsylvania benefited, too. To say he benefited from Bonusgate is simply to say he was a Democratic candidate for state House in 2006. And the courts have held that it’s the leaders of that conspiracy who are legally responsible, not the candidates who simply had no idea what was happening.

From a purely political standpoint, there’s pretty much unanimity of opinion, among both Democrats and Republicans, that the execution of this attack was botched by the Meehan campaign. I’m confident they now understand that. They kept a relatively lower profile in the aftermath, and didn’t come at Lentz hard again until this whole Jim Schneller fiasco, at which point they had their facts firmly correct and their ducks in a row.

All this having been said, I think it’s a good time to take stock of coverage of this race to date.

Look, I know people have had problems with how the race has been covered by pa2010.com, and I don’t blame them. A confluence of factors—geographical proximity to the district, no primaries, heated competition that started early—have made it the most thoroughly covered contest in the state, one in which we’re playing referee to a greater extent than anywhere else.

For months, the Meehan people were getting smacked back on these pages because they couldn’t get their facts right. More recently, the Lentz people have been subject to that treatment.

These candidates and the people around them share absolutely no love for each other. There is arguably no race in the state so filled with vitriol, and as things have swung back and forth, yours truly has often been caught in the middle. That’s the way it should be.

In an effort to really be honest with myself here, I went back and re-read pretty much every word I’ve ever written about the race (you can do the same by clicking here, but be sure to differentiate between the news stories and the blog/op-ed content). In more than 100 stories dating back to last April, I did find one clear mistake: this article about the Meehan campaign’s unpaid legal bills from fending off a ballot challenge.

There was nothing factually inaccurate about the story, and the crux of it was newsworthy because anything that substantively affects a candidate’s cash-on-hand is important. But the tone of it was completely out of whack. No one was accusing anyone of doing anything improper. So there was no reason for the article to take on such a tone. I offer up my regrets for this misstep.

Now, as we move forward, let’s remember one thing: This race is fun. This is hard-nosed electoral politics at both its best and its worst, exactly the kind of thing that should be candy for an audience of political junkies. I’ve learned a lot from covering it. I just hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.

Good luck to both the candidates.

August 13, 2010 at 1:18 pm

--Dan Hirschhorn

Tags: Bryan Lentz, Jim Schneller, PA-7, Pat Meehan

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