New York Times: This is why you vet even the pretty candidates
/New York Times: This is why you vet even the pretty candidates.
By Rubashov
All across New Jersey, teams of legislative candidates are taking form, press releases are being written and announcements made. Selling points are being unpacked: This one is pretty, that one “connected”, that one can raise money (even if only in theory). A big plus is when a prospective candidate appeared on some insider blog’s “list” or is supported by someone on that “list”. The hype surrounding it all blocks the ears and clouds the mind.
Very often, the vetting of candidates seems like something out of “Goodfellas”, complete with folks who look like extras from the movie: “We know him (or her), he’s one of us… a goodfella.” And that’s all there is. Vetting over.
The once valued vulnerability study is a thing of the past. Who needs to know what and who a candidate really is? It is much more fun to figure it out on the campaign trail when the attacks are flying.
Choosing candidates has become just another trip to the casino. An expensive bet, using other people's money, based on all the subjective evidence of a hunch.
How many recent races have exploded spectacularly over something even a simple criminal records search could have uncovered? But some powerful entity had laid hands on a candidate, adopted that candidate, and that was it. No questions welcomed. No considerations beyond the unquenchable will of the adopter. Until the campaign, and the voters, and then it all went to hell.
The New York Times wrote just such a story yesterday. About a young, attractive, apparently rich, but supremely unvetted candidate with an interesting backstory. He’s a Congressman-Elect from Long Island and the “first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent.” His name is George Santos.
Here are a few passages from the article, written by Times reporters Grace Ashford and Michael Gold:
Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Resume May Be Largely Fiction.
George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island in New York last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.
His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.
But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the resume that he sold to voters.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Santos’ campaign biography, told The New York Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.
His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and more than $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.
Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery…
Even the NRCC failed to vet the candidate and ended up posting unsubstantiated information on its own website about the candidate. You can read the entire story here (with no paywall):
Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Resume May Be Largely Fiction. (yahoo.com)
George Santos is evidence that even pretty candidates with cool backstories need to be vetted.
George Santos’ campaign raised $2.9 million ($1.7 million in contributions) and spent $3 million. Some of the vendors on his FEC report will be familiar to New Jersey politicos.
A trip to the website of one of these vendors displays the modern penchant for selling a political consultant based on some contrived presentation of “niceness” as opposed to the hard facts of merit. One such consultant is presented as…
Big Guy – Offensive Tackle big.
Big Laugh –A hearty guffaw, if you will.
Big Heart – A teddy bear outside of politics.
Is this a Big Pharma commercial? And if so, when do we get the “fatal events” warning?
Big Wins – Helping deliver critical wins for national Republicans, including half of the incoming GOP Senators in 2020 and a sweep of seven critical House races in Democratic territory in the GOP’s stunning gain of House seats in 2020.
Why not name some of them?
The only big thing missing… A Buffalo Bills Super Bowl win.
…a seasoned and successful consultant with an unmatched record of victory at the local, state and national level, with a particular focus on electing Republicans in the most Democratic territory possible.
A former congressional Chief of Staff… began his own consulting company and engineered one of only four GOP challenger victories over Democrat incumbents in the country in an Obama-wave year, in one of the most expensive contests in the country.
In the 2018 elections… was successful in 100 percent of the congressional races they consulted for, including (a GOP incumbent’s) district that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 (so did the GOP incumbent)... also successfully led the fight for one of the top-5 most contested and expensive races in the country, delivering a key win for GOP plans to take back the house.
What's with the emphasis on "expensive"? We would think that doing more with less, winning while expending fewer resources, would be prized over "expensiveness". A general isn't thought better of because his campaign cost more lives. But this is politics... not so much war, as business.
Other than that single candidate (an incumbent), no other candidate is mentioned, making the vetting of this particular consultant quite difficult.
An American Association of Political Consultants 40-Under-40 winner in 2019 (another of those “lists”)… has continued to build… into the go-to firm for critical GOP races throughout the country. Whether as part of America First, Congressional Leadership Fund… (the) firm has provided cutting-edge general consulting strategies, and groundbreaking creative to more than 100 clients across the country.
The firm does publish a client list, but it is a list shared by at least the nine consultants currently listed. Who did what is not detailed.
With the light of transparency being extinguished all across America – and especially in New Jersey – perhaps the need for truth finding agencies has never been greater. People have the right to know. And voters especially need to know.
"We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary."
George Orwell
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