Graves Situations
It was an interesting week for the Graves family, northwestern Missouri’s answer to the Kennedy clan except for the fact that the Graves don’t sail and they aren’t, like, all liberal and stuff.
Last week it was learned that Todd Graves was actually forced out of his job as U.S. Attorney in the burgeoning U.S. Attorney firing scandal. Along the way, brother and Congressman Sam will face the first real competition since winning the open congressional seat in 2000 thanks to former Mayor, Park University professor, Briarcliff resident and social, corsage wearing gadfly and name changing enthusiast, Kay Barnes.
It’s an intricate web of political goodness. Sam Graves votes with Bush with 95 percent of the time but that loyalty didn’t extend to his brother when, as Todd Graves explains it, he was too iconoclastic to be trusted and was earmarked for termination by the same administration.
When I first started hearing the rumblings about Todd Graves’ situation, I was positively aghast. I mean, who didn’t believe that he resigned from his U.S. Attorney post to start a private practice because that was on his list of things to do that day? Still, if you had told me then that in a year’s time, his name would be connected in a scandal that very few people understand or care about but extends all the way to the president, I would have been a little bit skeptical.
Luckily for Todd, several members of his family still have a fat fee office contract to keep the food on the table. The two fee offices his family members run (one, by his wife Tracy, the other his brother-in-law, Todd Bartle) are said to gross around $3.5 million dollars. Stephanie Goodnight, Tracy’s cousin, owns a management company that offers services to fee offices. That pulls in a pretty penny, too.
The Todd Graves connection gave many – particularly his political opponents — pause because it represented a blatant conflict of interest. If his immediate and extended family had fee office contracts, how could he remain impartial in the event there was ever a federal issue involving any of those fee offices?
So now there are plenty of other newspapers on the trail of the story – notably The Kansas City Star, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times and The Washington Post. So what makes The Luminary’s reporting on the issue different (other than the fact that we weren’t duped into believing this was an innocent resignation when it first happened)? It’s the fact that we’re the only newspaper that will print these words:
Duh. It’s a racket.
There’s nothing wrong with making a buck of course and these fee office plums have been doled out by politicians on both sides of the aisle for generations. But, you know, while the rest of us lackeys are making money in the private sector – and to be fair, the folks Governor Blunt has given fee offices to have done plenty of that too – it’s important to know that they’re making quite a bit of money off the public sector, too. That’s the game the Republicans and Democrats are really running. And If you think this is something that either party is going to give up without a fight, then you may be beyond hope. You’re lost in a sea of other messages and the one about the rackets, that one isn’t rising above the muck and reaching you.
That’s by design, of course. That’s why everyone is arguing about abortion and gay marriage – even down at the municipal and local level races. If you shine the light past all that bullshit, you start to see a clearer picture of the powers-that-be. Why are we arguing about Roe versus Wade when we’re electing people that should be helping us wade across our flood ridden roads?
Ask any politician’s staffer and they’ll tell you the same thing: they need to protect their elected bosses. Imagine, for a second, that you had to campaign and be elected to the job you have every two to four years or so. You’d be pretty ruthless, too.
And that’s why Congressman Sam Graves has had such a close watch on State Rep. Jason Grill. You know, he could be the next guy in line for his job, particularly after Grill dismantled his opponent last election (an opponent that used the same political advisor as Graves). That’s why Senator Kit Bond has an eye and a hand in the Todd Graves firing. The powers that be on the Republican side in the 6th District don’t really kiss the senior senator’s ring, ya know. That could be troublesome for a senator trying to choose a successor.
So you muddy the waters a bit. You stick to your talking points, you repeat the same lines over and over again, and when that doesn’t work, you mail copies of police reports or you get a lapdog newspaper to print something of dubious news value because hey, if it’s printed, it must be true, right? Either way, it looks great on an election flier.
And if you’re still not connecting with voters? Just change your name like the erstwhile Kay Waldo Barnes – now Kay Cronkite Barnes – did on the first day of her rural outreach program.
I mean, changing your name on the first day of your campaign?
Flip-flop! Flip-flop!