Let’s say you buy a bank-auctioned piece of property in a slightly remote area with a junker of a house sitting on it, a fixer-upper at best. You put a significant amount of money and personal physical labor into it so as to make it your home, not simply a house. After the County Assessor shows up and completes a re-assessment of the property, your tax bill goes up significantly. You pay it. As time goes by, you pay all your property taxes as they progressively increase based on the limiting provisions of Prop. 13.
Years go by and you lose the home in a terrible fire. Through your long re-building process it becomes apparent the County Assessor failed all that time ago in adequately measuring the square footage of your then-house, thus under-assessing you in property taxes all those years.
A typical bureaucratic mess, resulting in a nightmare for you. Should you have known the professional county appraisers couldn’t handle a tape measure or do simple math? Would you have known such a thing? Your property tax bill doesn’t show your square footage. After all, the county did increase your assessment based on a physical inspection. They are the experts, are they not?
Most importantly, who is responsible for the under-billed taxes? You probably need a tax attorney to help you sort all this out and represent you with a government that is bound to defend its own screw up.
However, if you’re not just an average Joe, but instead a United States Congressman, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, a conservative in a conservative District that the local newspaper has never understood, and a guy who consistently goes against that local paper, for instance, by staunchly defending the Miramar Marine Air Base against any attempts to turn it into a commercial airport, your nightmare has just begun.
The local paper runs a huge story asking or implying questions about whether you bought the property years ago through favors and whether you knew about the tax discrepancy. You’re a powerful politician, the story implies, so something must be amiss. Is it corruption?
So go the travails of Congressman Duncan Hunter.
Two days ago, Hunter shot back with a full-page ad in the Union-Tribune, making a mockery of the paper’s story, while pointing out the facts of the property purchase. The ad cost his campaign committee a modest $26,000. (The ad is a classic, a must see, as you have to view the photos that go along with it. Take a look at the attachment below.)
First, let’s make it clear that the only person anywhere who believes the U-T story will have an impact on Duncan’s re-election chances is his Democratic opponent, whose name escapes me at the present. I could look it up, but the gentleman is irrelevant.
The issue here is not Duncan’s re-election, it’s the man’s integrity, which should be unquestioned based on his personal and political history. In fact, other than a few attackers from the left, Duncan Hunter is above reproach. Yet, given the saga of one of his former congressional allies, Duke Cunningham, and heightened by a House Republican leadership under much scrutiny in recent weeks, one can understand Duncan’s desire to stand up and defend himself.
There are a couple of ways to look at the ad purchase.
First, it’s kind of like bending over to get a whipping, while taking your hands away from your ankles long enough to write a substantial check to your perpetrator. Ouch, but here you go.
Secondly, doesn’t this in a way go against the grain of a policy that we don’t negotiate with terrorists? Mull that one over.
On the other hand, let’s look at what the ad got Duncan. I’ll be the first to admit, I read the U-T every day, and I didn’t even see the ad on Friday. Many others like me, I surmise, are in the same boat. They read the headlines, scan the stories, read those of interest, and quickly gloss past the ads. Or, more like me, they read the on-line edition, thus not seeing the print ads at all. (A lesson, perhaps, for the candidates out there who believe newspaper ads are going to win it for you over direct voter contact.)
Yet, yesterday, the day after the ad runs, the U-T publishes a front-page-local-section story on the fact that it runs, calling it a rare move by a politician. Sure, the story rehashes the previous implications about the house, but it focuses now on the Hunter response, in a vehicle that he never would have had with a letter-to-the-editor or even an op-ed. Whether I saw the ad or not, I saw the big story about it, as did many others.
I would even go so far as to say that Duncan Hunter has been able to vindicate himself in the very newspaper so willing to take a chink out of his armor.
I’m not going deeper into the fact that a newspaper’s shotgun journalism resulted in a politician feeling the need to pay to defend himself on the pages of that very paper. The U-T, in fact, could have easily taken the $26k, run the ad, and not run a story about it. Although I hate to say it, kudos to the paper for doing so.
I will leave you with this, however. The day that a newspaper’s ad agents start calling politicians — or anyone maligned in the press for that matter, rightfully or not — to provide them ad rates in possible response to that morning’s news piece or editorial…well, that’s the day I may actually believe we’re going to hell in a handbasket.
by Barry Jantz