Wow, that was weird. More than 90 percent of the online commenters and emailers agreed with me about Mayor Nutter and the Papal Panic of '15. Stopped clock, right?...so you know I'm going to come back today with an opinion that virtually NO ONE agrees with, and so here goes. It's hard for anyone to disagree that Kathleen Kane has been a trainwreck as Pennsylvania's attorney general. But now that she's been indicted, I don't think she should resign. Let her have her day in court...and keep her job.
Three points:
1. One meme that's been spread far and wide is that Kane was only elected in 2012 -- the state's first elected Democratic AG, and the first female -- because she's a woman. That's neither fair nor true. In a state that has an embarrassingly dismal track record of electing females to high office, Kane's gender did seem a plus, but that's not why she won. As a junior county prosecutor with no experience to suggest she could make the huge leap to attorney general, Kane hopscotched over other, more qualified women (and beat, in a primary, maybe the most decent man in Pa. politics, ex-congressman and Iraq veteran Patrick Murphy) not because she's a woman, but because she was rich. Kane's campaign received more than $2 million from her then-husband, trucking executive Chris Kane...and that's how she won. If you're outraged by Kane's on-the-job performance, you should be fighting to get Big Money out of politics.
2. So (does his best Peter-Falk-as-Columbo voice*) there's just one thing I'm still confused about. Since Kane was indicted last week on charges related to leaking grand jury materials, lying about it, and intimidating staffers, an avalanche of newspaper editorial boards have called on her to resign, immediately. In fact I think a couple of new newspapers were launched just so they could urge Kane to quit. The most strident is the paper that's most aggressively covered the Kane story, the Inquirer. It urged her to step down back in April and now the paper really wants her to resign, writing this weekend: "But she cannot very well carry out the duties of one of the state's most important offices while mounting a complex criminal defense."
I'm a journalist, just like the folks on the Inquirer editorial board. One of the reasons I got into this racket is because -- other than your classic example of D-Day-type troop movements -- I don't believe in government secrecy. Period. Not at all. I abhor it. Presumably some people at the Inquirer feel that way, too, since its coverage of Kane has been built on a foundation of leaked information, including leaked grand jury material. I understand that a lot of the anti-Kane venom stems from other issues -- like her admittedly dreadful fumbling of the case against Philly lawmakers who received envelopes of cash and other gifts -- but when it comes to the leaking, you'd think that news organizations would be defending her, not calling for her to be burned at the stake, which brings us to... 3) Does it not seem that Kane is getting treated a lot differently from some other powerful politicians (cough, cough, Chaka Fattah, cough, Robert Menendez) who are under indictment, still in office, and yet seemingly not tearing a hole in the fabric of the universe. The Daily News noted after Kane's indictment that Pennsylvania's top pols tended to call it "sad" when Fattah (accused not of leaking... but helping to misuse hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars) got charged...Kane, so so much. I couldn't find any reaction from Gov. Wolf to Fattah's indictment, while the governor called for Kane to quit in a matter of minutes (Did I mention that it's Wolf who would get to appoint a successor to fill out her term? Probably not a factor, right?) Maybe the harsher treatment of Kane isn't happening because she's a woman. Maybe it's just because she's not part of the old-boy network. Emphasis on the word "boy."
But now the Inquirer editorial board says she can't possibly worry her pretty little head about her job and her defense at the same time. Really? Did they know that her predecessor Tom Corbett was attorney general for a year or more while he was also RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR, which seems like a pretty complex task, and which also could present certain conflicts (like, hypothetically, if a football coach at a popular state university was also a child molester). Nobody asked Corbett to resign. [UPDATE: Yes, the Inquirer did know, and in fact they did ask Corbett to resign in an editorial dated July 21, 2010. Good for them for being consistent, and bad for me for making a mistake. In the interest of clarity, I should note that my own paper, the Daily News, called for Fattah to resign as well as Kane, although it didn't go as far as the Inquirer which also called for her impeachment. So now you know.]
And neither should Kane. The truth that no one's acknowledging is that Pennsylvania has already survived a legion of crooks, scalawags, and incompetents in high office. Give the attorney general her day in court, and then let's see where she belongs on that list, or if she belongs at all. Her term ends in just 16 months or so. And Pennsylvania has a decent criminal justice system. Last time I checked, burning people at the stake wasn't part of it.
* Today's outdated cultural reference.
