Disgraceful

Just back from a meeting about ethics and while perusing the Virginia Political Blogs aggregator, I ran across this post about the behavior of Republicans in Maryland.

Steele, however, is ensnared in an incipient election scandal that we haven’t heard the last of yet.

[…]

Shortly before the election, the campaigns of both Steele and Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, Jr. (also a Republican, running for re-election–unsuccessfully) together hired six busloads of African-Americans from Philadelphia, many of them homeless, to distribute campaign literature on election day in black wards of Baltimore and Prince Georges County.

[…]

The problem is with what the paid workers were handing out: glossy brochures with photos of black Democratic leaders on the front, containing headlines reading “Democratic Sample Ballot” and then listing Steele and Ehrlich, with red check marks, along with a list of local Democratic candidates. Nothing in the brochures identified Steele and Ehrlich as Republicans.

[…]

And it’s not the first time the Ehrlich/Steele campaign did it. In the 2002 Gubernatorial race, where Ehrlich and Steele ran together, the campaign used a similar tactic with glossy brochures using pictures of black Democratic leaders and falsely implying their support for the GOP duo.

The post did not provide any links to this information, however, I have no reason to think the writer would make this up. Here is the story in the Washington Post.

This is absolutely disgraceful. Maryland election officials should have never let these guys get by with the tactic in 2002. And they certainly should be punished for doing so in 2006.

Such behavior, if not illegal, is certainly unethical. What kind of example are Steele and Ehrlich setting – anything goes as long as you don’t get caught? What ends will they go to in order to win an election? And what does that say about them as individuals?

I hope that they throw the book at these two. It is not enough that they both lost. Such behavior requires more than that.