Are Bush's stars 'helping' John McCain? And does it matter?

Maybe two years from now a congressional committee will answer this question: Did President Bush's White House dispatch top officials to key battleground states in a last-ditch effort to try to help John McCain's presidential campaign?

We raise the issue because the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a report detailing the extent to which the White House used the administration's stars -- and government travel dollars -- in the 2006 campaign in a failed effort to keep the Congress in Republican hands.

The operation had Karl Rove's fingerprints all over it.

The report, issued Wednesday, noted:

The White House used the political affairs office to orchestrate an aggressive strategy to use taxpayer-funded trips to help elect Republican candidates for public office. From January 1, 2006, until the mid-term elections on November 7, 2006, cabinet secretaries and other senior officials traveled to over 300 events recommended by the political affairs office. All of these events were held with Republican candidates, and in most cases, the travel costs were paid for with federal funds.

Is that legal? Perhaps, at least by some accounts. Ethically kosher? That's a good one for debate.

In any case, the report called the situation "a gross abuse of the public trust."

But it said that because most of those involved are no longer in office, "there is no effective remedy" if there were violations of the 1939 Hatch Act, which limits the use of public funds for partisan work.

And what about this sentence in the committee's report?

Even offices with statutory provisions prohibiting political activity, like the Office of National Drug Control Policy, were enlisted in the election effort.

In its report this morning, the Washington Post noted:

When Karl Rove's office requested special help for beleaguered Republican congressional candidates in the months before the 2006 elections, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy jumped to the task. Director John Walters was called a "superstar" by a Rove aide after carrying half-million-dollar grants to news conferences with two congressmen and a senator.

Walters's visits to Utah, Missouri and Nevada were among at least 303 out-of-town trips by senior Bush appointees meant to lend prestige or bring federal grants to 99 politically endangered Republicans that year, in a White House campaign that House Democratic investigators yesterday called unprecedented in scope and scale.

-- James Gerstenzang

Photo: Tannen Maury / European Pressphoto Agency

Comments

[Jim]

Either now or later, put Karl Rove in jail. He deserves it and the country critically needs it to get back onto some sort of a morally defensible track.
In the presence of our allies we can only hang our heads in shame for the behavior of our nation in the last eight years.