Clean Republicans, dirty Democrats, a biased paper, another day in Houston.
Mayor Bill White is moving on after serving as Houston’s mayor for the last five-plus years. Love him or hate him, he seems to have done at least an adequate job cleaning up Lee Brown’s mess. He served the city of Houston well during his tenure as mayor and is hoping his record will propel him to a seat in the U.S. Senate.
The Democrats are once again poised to control Houston and bring with them the inevitable corruption that infects the party to its very core, at least if you look at the simple fact that only the Republican candidate, Roy Morales, has abstained from taking illegal campaign contributions.
The open mayoral seat has motivated a diverse field of new faces to compete to replace the outgoing White. The Democrats are heavily favored to hold on to the mayor’s office and offer candidates from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.
Annise Parker, the current controller of the City of Houston, is the first viable, openly gay Houston mayoral candidate in history and is leading in most polls. Peter Brown and Gene Locke, both fellow Democrats, are also running strong campaigns and are currently in second and third, respectively. Morales is running far behind in both poll numbers and funding.
With ‘not sure’ leading the polling at 36 percent, however, one thing is clear: the race for mayor is far from over.
In a recent article in the Houston Chronicle, it was reported that all three leading candidates – Parker, Locke and Brown – have taken illegal contributions.
The Chronicle reported that Locke and Parker received money from donors illegally during a ‘blackout period,’ which prohibits political contributions 30 days after a public contract has been awarded. Looks as if local Democrats have learned that quid-pro-quo deals with big businesses aren’t limited to democratic senators such as Chris Dodd and Barney Frank or presidential candidates such as Barack Obama.
Brown’s illegal contributions seem to be of the less questionable sort. The Brown campaign had to return a measly $500 to meet with legality standards, whereas Parker had to return $9,400, and Locke set the gold standard for corruption as his campaign was forced to return $15,000 in order to comply with that pesky nuisance called the law.
For all intents and purposes, White’s tenure as mayor of Houston was virtually scandal free, and while these three candidates have returned any illegally donated funds, it is troubling that one party seems to be having so much trouble simply running honest campaigns, much less in the metropolis known as Houston.
Another troubling aspect is that in reporting the shortcomings of the Democratic mayoral candidates, the Chronicle – the city’s only major newspaper – buried the fact that Moralesis the only clean candidate. The biased news organization ran a misleading headline entitled ‘3 leading candidates give back illegal donations’ and did not mention that Morales was the only innocent party until the 11th paragraph.
If the Chronicle possessed an ounce of fairness, the headline would have read more along the lines of ‘Democrats receive illegal donations’ or ‘Morales running a corruption free campaign.’ Of course, fairness is probably too much to ask from a paper with a monopoly on the Houston market.
Maybe the folks at the Chronicle were concerned that an honest headline would catch the eyes of those 36 percent undecided voters and give Morales a fighting chance.
Timothy Mathis is a history junior and may be reached at [email protected]
