The cover page story in the glossy special feature, Los Angeles Times Magazine is titled
Dogging DeLay. Flip the pages to the inside and read,
The Lone Ranger: Some say Democratic Texas Dist. Atty. Ronnie Earle is out to get Republican Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful men in Congress. Earle says he's after something even bigger.
Money quote 1:
For 100 years Texas law has barred corporations and labor unions from contributing to state political campaigns--and for good reason, Earle says. "For them to compete with ordinary citizens compounds the influence of corporations at the expense of citizens. It makes 'one person, one vote' a mockery." . . . "Change that law, and the pretense of any democratic system in the state will be at an end," says David Butts, a political consultant who worked on Earle's last two campaigns. "Why have elections at all? Let's just have an auction and just bid.
Money quote 2:
"As goofy, as naive, as weird as it may sound, I really do believe we're at a turning point of democracy," Watson says. "It is rare in public life that someone has the opportunity to fundamentally affect the future. Ronnie stands at the X-point of something that's much bigger than him."
[Much, much more in Extended Entry/
This well written four page article includes all kinds of local and biographical color. I recommend everyone read the whole thing. Here are the highlights:
Now in his 28th year as district attorney, Earle embodies Austin's offbeat ethos, casual liberalism and chronic nostalgia for simpler times. By many measures--its vibrant music and filmmaking scenes, its urbane tastes--this is a hip city, but it's also an earnest one. When Earle lectures about threats to democracy, as he often does these days, he is dead serious.
"I have a belief in the grace and promise of this country that has to do with growing up when we grew up," he says. "At my deepest level I'm not cynical. I believe all the stuff I say about this. It's not an act."
The stakes are just as high for Earle as they are for DeLay:
At this writing, the undoing of DeLay is far from certain. But the outcome of the campaign finance case may be even more important to Earle. It will likely define his career, eclipsing the innovative criminal justice programs that are his real legacy. It will either redeem or confirm his reputation as an unpredictable prosecutor who can't quite make the big cases, whose reach often exceeds his grasp, whose best advocate and worst enemy are the same person: himself. "Most of my wounds have been self-inflicted," Earle says.
But he also is a formidable adversary in the press, sticking to message: "I'm just doing my job." He gets the benefit of the doubt on the editorial pages, the interviews on "60 Minutes," the magazine profiles. "Is a story in GQ next?" asks an exasperated Sherry Sylvester, former communications director of the state GOP. "Ronnie Earle is the most powerful Democrat in Texas. He is a partisan who uses his position as district attorney and works with the media. He simply is not credible."
He certainly isn't credible to Republican operatives. Other folks have a different take:
District attorneys routinely boast of their conviction rates (Earle's hovers between 85% and 90%), but prosecutors can manipulate statistics by cherry-picking winnable cases. By most accounts, Earle does not. The cops roll their eyes at his penchant for new programs, but he has won accolades from the Justice Department and the National District Attorneys Assn. And his nearly Socratic approach to death penalty cases (he weighs advice from a panel of 10 colleagues in the district attorney's office) made Earle the subject of a lengthy profile in Time magazine two years ago. . . . Running against a third-party candidate last year, he won another term with 83% of the vote. He has the mandate to do what he wants, and that's exactly what he says he's doing now: calling into account those who violate the spirit of the law.
DeLay and the Republican party are trying to accuse Earle of being a partisan hack. That charge falls flat when his record is considered:
Quite a few politicians have wished Earle were somewhere else. Over the years his Public Integrity Unit has prosecuted 15 elected officials, including 12 Democrats. But two well-known defendants, including Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, were acquitted. And many of the cases involved misdemeanors--penny ante stuff compared to the dozens of felony counts now pending in the campaign finance probe. The money-laundering charge facing two defendants--DeLay fundraiser Jim Ellis and former Texans for a Republican Majority executive director John Colyandro--is punishable by a prison term of five to 99 years.
Hot Tub Tommy's biggest problem is that his corporate good buddies think bottom line profits are more important than political loyalty to Tom DeLay:
Three of DeLay's political associates have been indicted, and prosecutors are circling a fourth, Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick. All are linked to DeLay's political action committee Texans for a Republican Majority, which, along with the Texas Assn. of Business, funneled more than $2.6 million in corporate funds to Republican legislative candidates. Four of the eight national corporations that were indicted for contributing funds have turned state's evidence in return for the charges being dropped. In courthouse jargon, that's called "flipping"--and it increases the likelihood of testimony against individuals such as Craddick and DeLay, who have not been charged with any crimes.
You could almost argue that these companies have a fiduciary duty to help convict Tom DeLay to redeem their company image and focus on improving profits for shareholders.
This story is about Ronnie Earle the man, as much as it is about the facts or the legal case:
Though his shock of dark hair has gone pewter, Earle has a scattershot intensity that gives him a boyish aspect. Unlike the $400-an-hour defense attorneys with whom he spars, he's universally known by the diminutive of his first name. Almost every sentence written about him invokes a paradox: . . . People seem to like Earle instinctively, without knowing quite what to make of him. For a man who's been reelected eight times, six of those without breaking a sweat, he remains a puzzle. "You have to realize, he's not of us," says former Austin attorney Dave Richards, a longtime player in liberal politics. "I know within reason the behavior of most of those in public office, and he doesn't fit the pattern. He's either aloof, or detached, or something."
Ronnie Earle is not your typical Texas good old boy:
"Ronnie was never an Austin liberal, he was never their guy. He was seen as a goody two-shoes who was having his strings jerked by the establishment law firms," Richards says. Once elected, Earle didn't hang with the establishment either. He made no bones about his periodic need to retreat from the courthouse hurly-burly and indulge what Richards calls his "flaky, Zen, spiritualist" side.
"Much of my job involves making moral decisions, trying to decide what's right. I don't always know what's right off the top of my head. I have to think about it," Earle said in 1981. He talks the same way today.
The media is trying to give Earle a celebrity image:
Earle's story has lately reminded journalists of a different Western, the favorite of presidents: "High Noon." He had talked about retiring before the 2004 election, but couldn't find another Democrat willing to run. It's easy to see Earle as a modern-day Marshal Kane, reluctantly staying on to fight the good fight while everyone else hangs back. But he rejects the cinematic comparison.
"It's not about me," he says. "I'm really not comfortable with all this attention. It's pretty much the opposite of what I've spent my whole career trying to teach. . . .The job of citizens in a democracy is to figure out what the truth is and act on that. The point of 'High Noon' is that the citizen in the long run has to take responsibility. The man on the white horse, that's not democracy."
And he has been favorably compared to Eliott Spitzer:
In the ease with which he conveys authenticity, Earle resembles another politician who rose to prominence in Austin and talks a lot about democracy: George W. Bush. He also draws comparisons to another Democratic prosecutor, New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer, whose crusade against Wall Street corruption positioned him to run for New York's governorship. But Earle lacks their overweening ambition: "I'm 63 and I'm still down the street," he says, meaning the county courthouse.
Regardless of the legal and political outcome, I've got a funny feeling this story is going to turn out better for Ronnie Earle than it does for Tom DeLay:
"There's something about doing this work that makes you reach deeper and higher than you thought you could," Earle says. "I've chosen it over and over again. And I'd do it again."
He recently heard someone on the radio say that people are usually surprised by how their lives turn out--they had expected to accomplish more. Earle jotted it down on a scrap of paper and stuck it in his pocket, as he often does with random thoughts. Maybe he'll come up short in his own mind too, this iconoclastic prosecutor nearing the end of his career.
Then again, maybe not.
