Puckett's Non-Problem: The Rumor Mill Churns and There's Nothing There

Thomas Cook longs to be the next Jen Wagner, living large in the blogosphere, smearing candidates and career politicos left and right, all while taking Dan Parker's money and acting as his hired gun in the Hoosier Internets.

Instead, he spends most of his time banging out laughable and factually incorrect press releases.

Today, he decided to throw out for consideration two smears on 2nd District Republican Congressional candidate Luke Puckett.

The first involves unpaid property taxes by Puckett in 2006. Hardly surprising given the problems that frequent the dispatch of property taxes in Indiana to property owners, but I digress. Joe Donnelly, Puckett's opponent, had four and a half times as much in unpaid property taxes as of January that same year.

The second, of course, is the infamous "churning rumor mill," a "bubbling, brewing issue" of sorts. What rumor mill, you ask? What bubbling, brewing issue, you wonder?

I asked myself the same question.

So I went to the Puckett campaign and asked them what was up.

And, surprise, surprise, they sent me a response.

The answer was rather deflating, to be honest. No lurking demons from Puckett's past history. No outstanding arrest warrants. No spurned lovers. Nope. Nothing so entertaining or droll.

It seems that a former volunteer for the Puckett campaign got himself into some trouble with the law (the individual in question had, as they say, "past history"; campaigns, alas, do not do background checks on volunteers), and decided to make some noise and file a complaint against the campaign with the Indiana Civil Rights Commission.

No doubt, Thomas Cook will soon make much of unveiling scans of the complaint to the ICRC. I'm sure he acquired them from completely legitimate sources and that they were open public record and all that.

Even so, the whole thing is a giant nothing.

A volunteer came to the Puckett campaign, was an eager supporter, and wanted to help out. He even had contacts among the smaller local radio stations around South Bend.

The volunteer came to parades and events, and did all of the things that volunteers do. He even, I am told, got his photo snapped in a campaign t-shirt. This photo, in turn, showed up in a pre-primary Puckett campaign commercial.

After the ad ran a few times, somebody called the Puckett campaign and asked them if they knew that the volunteer in question was a convicted felon. Having not done a background check on every campaign volunteer or parade walker, the Puckett folks were surprised to learn this. They went to the volunteer, told him that someone had said this about him, and asked him if what the campaign had been told was true.

The volunteer denied it.

End of story, right? That's what the Puckett campaign thought (they're big believers in truth, honesty, redemption, forgiveness, etc).

The volunteer, however, thought differently. He apparently went and tracked down the person that had told the campaign about him. Next thing anyone knows, the volunteer is in jail.

As soon as he gets out of jail, he files a complaint with the Indiana Civil Rights Commission against the Puckett campaign, saying that they owed him back pay and had discriminated against him.

How an unpaid volunteer is owed back pay, since he was never contracted with the campaign to be paid or compensated for anything, remains a mystery to me. I've been a volunteer for many a campaign; free pizza and soft drinks are about the extent of the pay that you can expect.

Now, challenging congressional campaigns are always happy to have unpaid volunteers, and they sure don't do background checks on them beforehand. Moreover, if they had in this one instance, for the volunteer happened to be an African American, they would have no doubt been accused of racial profiling or something similar.

So what, pray tell, did the Puckett campaign do wrong?

Should they have turned down the volunteer when he came to them? That, more so than what actually happened, would have been discriminatory.

Should they do expensive background checks on all of their dozens and dozens of volunteers to determine their past histories? That's hardly practical (or affordable). It's also not fitting with basic Christian beliefs in things like honesty, openness, and redemption.

Certainly, it would be wrong to assume that every person of color is a former criminal (even if this volunteer was or was not). Individuals, regardless of skin color, don't go around with signs blinking over their heads that say "Warning! I'm a former criminal!"

Should they have paid the volunteer money to go away when he filed the complaint? That would hardly be proper either. Then they would be accused of trying to hush up some impropriety where none existed. What sort of back pay do they owe him anyway? An additional free t-shirt? A few more slices of pizza?

Should the Puckett campaign not be an open movement for change in the 2nd District? There is no rule that says someone cannot volunteer or should not be allowed to volunteer because of the color of their skin.

I mean, honestly. What should they have said? Sorry, our campaign t-shirts don't look good on your skin color? Yeah, right.

So what should the Puckett campaign have done? And why should Luke Puckett be faulted at all for running an open and inclusive campaign that someone with "past history" decided to take for a ride?

Indeed, if anything, Puckett should be praised for not having the sort of knee-jerk reaction to this volunteer and these circumstances that other less tolerant and less Christian campaigns might had.

He did the right thing; it is hard to fault him for it, let alone unjustly and wrongly smear him.