Politico Buries The Lede To Score Points Against Comstock

Politico has spent a lot of digital ink this campaign attacking Barbara Comstock. In fact, they’ve so rarely written about her opponent, John Foust, you’d think she was running unopposed for Congress in Virginia’s 10th District.

Mere days after the big reveal of John Foust’s survey answers securing the far left Daily Kos endorsement, Politico comes out with a hit piece/in-kind contributions attempting to paint Barbara Comstock into an ethical corner for, well, being a conservative.

Comstock has been a long-time supporter of Virginia’s right-to-work policies, sponsoring legislation to protect workers’ secret ballot, secure employee privacy in the face of big labor demands, and remove union mandates in state contracts.

This legislation, generally agreed upon by most if not all elected officials with an R next to their name, happened to also be advocated by the Workforce Fairness Institute, a group that Comstock worked for between 2008 and 2012.

Politico is making hay of the fact that this group wasn’t specifically listed in her Virginia Statement of Economic Interests – even though it was disclosed to the fullest extent of Virginia law – and that it was missed (but then corrected) in Comstock’s Congressional economic interest filing as noted by the Washington Post months ago, making this story both irrelevant and old.

Even Politico admits as much, burying the lede in their own story by citing experts and watchdog groups who say Comstock did nothing wrong – either in her filings or in voting on the issues.

But that doesn’t stop them from spending an entire article highlighting the issues Workforce Fairness Institute’s fights for and Comstock’s role – again, neither of which are illegal or even controversial unless you’re in the pocket of Big Labor and fighting for every one of their issues contrary to Virginia’s right-to-work history.

Politco’s hope, and that of the DCCC and Foust staffers who fed them the story, is that there may be legs on this in the Bob McDonnell era of Virginia politics, where everything is questioned and Virginia’s historically lax ethics laws are wilting under the harsh light of controversy.

But this doesn’t rise to the level of McDonnell controversy. It’s not even remotely Puckett level to-do. Instead we are consistently seeing ethics accusations used as a club to beat opponents, not actually raise the bar among elected officials.

The 2014 cycle certainly appears to be one in which ethics battles are back in vogue. And a new group on the scene, the American Democracy Legal Fund, is laying the pathway for many more groups to wage political warfare through typically ignored regulatory filings and ethics-committee investigations in the future.

The ADLF represents a new breed of complainant in what McGehee terms “Dark Arts Campaigning 101.” Whereas most ethics watchdogs maintain at least an appearance of bipartisanship, in the past month the ADLF has filed ethics complaints against nine Republican candidates, eight of whom are facing difficult elections in November, and not a single complaint against a Democrat. The ninth Republican targeted by the group, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, is running for governor in 2015.

“This looks like a pretty clear and straightforward attempt to go after one party,” McGehee said. “I have to say I haven’t really seen that before in this way. The groups that have been involved [in filing ethics complaints] have generally been pretty careful about trying to stay nonpartisan. This is kind of a different take on it.”

The ALDF has also targeted Barbara Comstock in the wake of the old Washington Post article, knowing there is no there there, but also knowing that there will be no resolution until after the election in November. They’re just hoping for a gotcha moment that won’t come – unless it’s Politico writing the story.

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