Myth: female pols are more honest
You’re not allowed to say this, but. . .
There are certain important topics women, as a rule, aren’t up to par on yet.
Sports, for example.
How many of the ladies can tell you who the Dodgers pitcher was who struck out Mickey Mantle four times in a single World Series game?
There are a few other topics women lag behind on as well. As a rule, they don’t know a crankshaft from a camshaft.
You begin to see the point, right?
But. . .but, as men will readily admit — privately, anyway — women overall are both way smarter and way tougher than men. In those categories, men aren’t even close.
And now we inch up to the really Big, Big, Big Question: Are women in politics more honest than men?
At one time it was widely believed so. And at one point in time this advantage in perceived honesty would have been a mighty boost to Kim Guadagno in her bid to become the next Governor of New Jersey.
But Hillary Clinton pretty much squandered the notion of any female advantage in honesty. Hillary put the notion of innate female honesty to the test like the Big Bad Wolf put the Three Little Pigs’ straw house to the test.
Richard Nixon had his 18-minutes of erased Watergate tapes. Hillary Clinton closed the gender honesty gap with her 30,000 deleted emails, wiped clean with BleachBit soon after the drew attention to her unsecure, regulation-dodging, off-the-grid email system.
But others bear some blame, too, regarding women’s dwindling reputation for honesty in politics — as we’re about to see.
Now the spotlight shifts from the national to the local scene. Kim Guadagno’s hoping to succeed her sidekick Gov. Chris Christie in a nationally watched election.
The campaign pits her against Democrat Phil Murphy, who’s a candidate of Goldman Sachs provenance. (Just like the fiscally clueless, one-term Gov. Jon Corzine. And just just like the fiscally clueless Hank Paulson, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury during the near-meltdown of America’s financial system.)
In the post-Hillary era, it now looks like the gender honesty gap, which in the past might have worked in Guadagno’s favor, has all but vanished.
In her political ads Guadagno bills herself as a Herculean mom who’s gonna take up the broom and clean out the Augean stables of state government.
She’ll “audit Trenton,” say her TV spots.
But thanks to the vanishing gender honesty gap, you now hear cynical Jersey wags asking: “Why bother with an audit?”
“Since Guadagno’s been a top-level insider going on eight years now, doing double duty as Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State, why doesn’t she skip the audit and just point out, herself, the Statehouse closets where the skeletons are hidden?”
So say the wags.
Here’s another question: If a Gov. Guadagno did “audit Trenton,” would the citizens of New Jersey ever see the results?
History suggests the answer: “Not likely.”
Before she became Christie’s backup, she did a stint as Deputy Director of the state Criminal Justice Division, an arm of the N.J. Attorney General’s Office. Then she got into politics, winning election in 2007 as Monmouth County Sheriff.
She was hailed as a rising star when she returned to Trenton with the Christie entourage as his No. 2. But then she found herself embroiled in a brouhaha dating back to her Sheriff days.
It was, you might argue, a scandal of middling magnitude, as these things tend to go in New Jersey.
It seems she had pulled something of a fast one as Sheriff by finagling a double-dipping arrangement for a political backer she installed as chief honcho of the Sheriff’s staff, a retired county detective, Michael W. Donovan Jr. (Now holding the title Undersheriff.)
Guadagno arranged for him to draw $172,500 a year in both pension and salary. The trustees of the state-administered Police and Firemen’s Retirement System (PFRS) questioned the arrangement as possibly “fraudulent.” They called for an investigation.
Such details as eventually came to light, however, were due not to the efforts of state agencies but the efforts of a tenacious, award-winning investigative reporter, Mark Lagerkvist. He doggedly tracked a trail of phonied-up records and contradictory statements.
While Guadagno had introduced Donovan in a staff memo as her second in command, as her “chief law enforcement officer” — and had listed him as such on the Sheriff’s website organization chart — she actually had arranged to carry him on the payroll in the fictional position of “chief warrants officer.” No such position was listed on her organization chart at the time — though he took the oath of office for that position.
The artifice apparently enabled Guadagno’s second in command to sidestep pension system rules requiring him to forgo his pension while drawing a salary. It also apparently enabled him to duck a requirement that he resume paying an 8.5 percent contribution to the retirement plan.
Eventually, seemingly begrudgingly, an official investigation — or purported investigation — was mounted. By the Criminal Justice Division. Guadagno’s old outfit. Where she’d been Deputy Director.
Gov. Christie could have ap-
pointed a special counsel to handle the probe but didn’t.
This left the case in the hands, ultimately, of his Attorney General, Paula Dow. While months slipped by with no investigative results — and for that matter, no apparent investigative activity — the Attorney General’s Office waged aggressive legal efforts to withhold information that might have shed light on Guadagno’s suspected shenanigans. The Attorney General’s Office insisted it was doing so only to uphold investigative confidentiality.
Meanwhile, an impatient PFRS board of trustees kept bugging the Attorney General’s Office on the status of the supposed ongoing state investigation.
And finally, in response, the Attorney General’s Office abruptly informed the board one day that the investigation had been quietly closed — a year and eight months earlier!
Why the delay in relaying this bit of info? Why keep the news from the pension board all that time? Those unanswered questions remain to this day among the lingering little mysteries of the case.
Had Guadagno actually ever even been questioned in the supposed probe? Unknown but doubtful. When the pension board sought details of the investigative findings, the Attorney General’s Office again mounted an aggressive legal opposition. The AG declared, again, that it was doing so only to safeguard investigative confidentiality.
Looking just a little bit beyond the Guadagno flap, we happen upon other local evidence that the gender honesty gap that once favored women in politics has significantly diminished, if not disappeared.
Ponder the case of Guadagno’s political pal, Deborah Trout, one-time Sheriff of bucolic Hunterdon County. She and two underlings found themselves indicted in 2010 on charges of official misconduct.
Among the allegations were charges that Trout had hired staff without proper background checks, had required pledges of political loyalty from staff and had issued fake law enforcement credentials to political supporters, including a drug company CEO and major financial backer of Gov. Christie.
But before the case could come to trial, Attorney Gen. Dow — the Christie appointee who’d helped shepherd the Guadagno controversy into oblivion — took the unusual step of intervening in the case and having the indictment withdrawn, ostensibly due to its “legal and factual deficiencies.”
Bennett A. Barlyn, the assistant prosecutor who had handled the probe, was yanked off the case. And when he persisted in objecting to the intervention from Trenton, he was discharged. Whereupon Barlyn filed a whistleblower’s lawsuit against the state.
While the lawsuit simmered on a back judicial burner, there was a sidelight development. In 2012, Gov. Christie bestowed upon Attorney Gen. Dow a Superior Court judgeship.
There she joins other select jurists in enjoying, in effect, a lifetime sinecure in a judiciary notorious for its solicitous sycophancy in upholding the asserted prerogatives of the Governor’s Office — the very office that dispenses the black robes and gavels. (Guadagno’s husband, now retired, was one of the select jurists, nominated to the bench in 2005 by then interim Gov. Dick Codey, a Democrat.)
While the Christie administration had resisted demands that it appoint outside counsel in the Guadagno controversy, it didn’t hesitate to bring in outside counsel to represent the state in the whistleblower case.
The administration opted to bypass the hundreds of lawyers on the Attorney General’s staff, in essence the biggest law firm in the state. Inst1ead, the administration brought in Gibbons P.C., an outside firm with Christie political pal William Palatucci prominent on its roster.
The firm billed the state for $3.8 million. And it settled the case with ousted prosecutor Barlyn for $1.5 billion — on the condition he shut his mouth and keep it shut.
The upshot of the settlement is that details of a case of official misconduct have now been consigned to a legal black hole, never to see the light of day.
The Attorney General’s Office insists it settled the case not in acknowledgement of any misconduct but only to save tax dollars by cutting short the whistleblower litigation. (A lawyer professionally familiar with the case comments anonymously on that claim by making an onanistic hand gesture.)
Why the delay in relaying this bit of info? Why keep the news from the pension board all that time? Those unanswered questions remain to this day among the lingering little mysteries of the case.
So there you have it, a little something to mull over as the campaign for Governor progresses.
Minor matters? Tempests in a teapot? De minimis distractions?
The Lieutenant Governor dismisses it as old and discredited news, dredged up and rehashed by political foes.
That line of defense had only mixed success for Hillary Clinton. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out for Kim Guadagno.
In any event, it’s now clear the assumed honesty gap in favor of female political figures has pretty much been erased.
To paraphrase the old Virginia Slims cigarette ad: “You Have, Indeed, Come a Long Way, Baby.”