With friends like state Rep.

Monday, July 10, 2000

With friends like state Rep. Rob Leighton’s, he doesn’t need any enemies, and Jeff Anderson might not need to buy any advertising to defeat him in the next election. What Rob Leighton’s political and professional careers need is for everyone but him and his wife to forget his recent gross misdemeanor so he can concentrate on recovery and rebuilding in the privacy of their personal life.

Every time someone wishing to defend Leighton writes a letter to the editor or speaks publicly about his DWI conviction, it raises his name yet again in association with something that cannot help any bid for re-election to the House. They feel, with fatal naivete about mass communications and public reaction, that they defend him and this can only do good. To defend an historical event, however, requires facts and facts that can contradict the facts of his behavior, confession, conviction and sentence. What the letters have offered, however, is personal opinion on the meaning and significance of the facts without ever contravening the facts. They offer personal opinion, indeed blinding predisposition, as a defense against established fact. It doesn’t work.

When a defender complains that the Austin Daily Herald and other news media give too much space and time to his offense, they add to the very publicity to which he or she objects. What the Herald has published (with, in my judgment, a great deal of restraint), has been factual reports of public information, largely from public records. The Herald publisher and editor chose not to editorialize on the issue and, thereby, take an institutional position. They gave us the facts and have left it to readers to each draw individual conclusions about their significance. The Herald has not, and I don’t expect it to, editorialized Leighton’s defeat and Anderson’s election.

Whereas the Herald only published a report of facts, the defensive letters constitute private editorializing. They offer the very thing from which the Herald restrained itself: opinion. Moreover, such open a can of worms, because they provoke other personal opinion that goes against Leighton. If his defenders could have found contravailing or at least mitigating facts and reported them, it might (just might) be worth taking the risk of further exposure of the unfortunate incident.

Moreover, when his defenders turn hostile against other voters who are disappointed or even scandalized by his behavior, they become guilty of the very thing for which they denigrate those who disagree with them. They charge that those who have written against, or even with concern about, Leighton with a judgmental attitude and unkindness. And some have done it in a blatantly judgmental way with gross unkindness. This provokes a local war that no one can win.

Although one reporter seems to have done his best to manipulate Jeff Anderson, who has announced for the House seat under the Republican Party, to say he is running against Leighton, a Democrat, on the basis of Leighton’s character, Anderson refused to be taken in. He did assert forthrightly that good character is a qualification for public office, but he refused to comment on Leighton’s character. Although that is a smart tactic, it also is the use of the restraint that is a quality of good character. In effect, Anderson has invited voters to observe his character and now he has put his reputation on the line.

I would like to see Rob Leighton left to himself and whatever help he can find to recover and rebuild. He has, in office, been sensitive to the opinions, wishes and feelings of his constituents. Perhaps this is why he finds this negative publicity so painful. Sadly, it is his "defenders" who give him most of it.

Wallace Alcorn’s column appears Mondays