Chapter 2 The best politicians money can buy

2: Paragraph 1 A people gets the kind of government it deserves and deserves the kind of government it gets. If you believe in karma, you have to wonder what evil deeds Delawareans committed in former lives to deserve the kind of government they've got.

2: Paragraph 2 Although parts of the story were told to me by various people, the following account of what happened in 1966 and 1976 is taken mostly from Joseph Donald Craven's 1978 book 'All Honorable Men'. There are many parallels between this book about what happened to me at E. F. Hutton and that book about what happened to him in the antiwar movement in Delaware.

2: Paragraph 3 Craven was a lawyer who was elected AG in 1954, the only Democrat to win that office between 1912 and 1974. Despite having been a stalwart Democrat from childhood, by 1966 Craven realized that, no matter whether the players labeled themselves Republicans or Democrats, in Delaware there was only one political party, and that was the Establishment. So he helped start the Constitution Party to run antiwar candidates for the U. S. Senate and House in that year's election. AG David P. Buckson and both Senators then were Republicans, and the Congressman and Governor were Democrats.

2: Paragraph 4 At that time Delaware had no provision for independent candidates or write-in votes, so the only way a person could be a candidate was to be nominated by a political party. Under the law in effect since 1955, to rate a place on the ballot for its nominee a party had to submit petitions signed by 500 citizens of one county and 250 citizens each of the other two counties; that's what minority parties had been doing for a decade to be on statewide ballots, but none of their candidates had gotten as many as 500 votes, so they hadn't been a real threat to the Establishment.

2: Paragraph 5 In March the Constitution Party put an announcement in the newspaper and started collecting signatures door-to-door. In May the Democrats introduced in the General Assembly a bill changing the law to require any new political party to submit signatures of 50 citizens of each senatorial district, and each of those signers had to be registered to vote but not registered as a member of any other political party. There were then only four categories for registration: Democrat, Republican, Independent, and Decline; so the signatories had to be registered as Independents or Declines.

2: Paragraph 6 The last date for changing registrations that year was 23 July. The General Assembly Would adjourn on 17 June, and the state constitution provided that no bill could become law after the Assembly adjourned unless the Governor signed it within 30 days of the adjournment. The senate passed the bill on 6 June, and the house on 16 June; the Governor didn't sign it until 21 July, which was 34 days after the legislature adjourned and only 2 days before the deadline to change registrations.

2: Paragraph 7 Of course the Constitution Party did not have enough signatures of voters not registered as Democrats or Republicans, so the elections clerks refused to include its candidates on the ballots. The Party sued those clerks in Superior Court, which kicked the case upstairs to the state Supreme Court; although by law the AG is required to represent all public officers, in this suit the clerks were represented by William S. Potter who happened to be Delaware's Democratic National Committeeman, and he had also been the lawyer who had won the earlier case ruling that the AG had to represent public officers, so he must have known what he was doing was illegal.

2: Paragraph 8 There were three justices on the panel that heard the case: Chief Justice Wolcott was a friend of Potter's and a former partner in Potter's firm who was appointed by the former governor, the same Democrat who had appointed Justice Carey and was a close friend of Lyndon Johnson's, and Justice Herrman had been appointed by the Democrat who was then governor. On 14 October the court ruled unanimously against the Constitution Party and never addressed the fact that the bill under which the clerks rejected the Party's petitions hadn't ever become law because the governor waited too long to sign it.

2: Paragraph 9 It was too late by then to appeal that decision to the U. S. Supreme Court before the 8 November election. The polls showed the Republicans' incumbent candidates for Senator and AG leading, and the Democrats' incumbent candidate for Representative was ahead of the Republican. On 28 October the Constitution Party publicly asked its supporters to vote for the Republican candidates. The Republicans won all six statewide offices by the largest margins in Delaware's history, ten times what the Democrats' majorities had been in 1960. Ironically enough, in sending that message to the supposedly warmongering Democrats, Delawareans elected to Congress a Republican who campaigned on a platform that LBJ had not been warlike enough in Vietnam: now-Senator Roth.

2: Paragraph 10 In October 1968 the U. S. Supreme Court invalidated as unconstitutional an Ohio statute that prevented write-in votes and required all parties except the two major ones to submit petitions to get a candidate on the ballot. In 1974 the U. S. Supreme Court invalidated as unconstitutional a California statute that kept an independent candidate from being on a ballot without a political party's endorsement. Those rulings ['Williams v. Rhodes', 393 U.S. 23 (1968); 'Storer v. Brown', 415 U.S. 724 (1974)] meant Delaware's whole election law, in effect since 1955, was unconstitutional.

2: Paragraph 11 Sordid as it is - and that was just the, you should pardon the expression, high points of what happened - that story by itself might not prove how the Establishment pulls together to disenfranchise Delawareans, but then it happened again:

2: Paragraph 12 In the spring of 1976 Joseph F. McInerney was unsuccessful in getting the Democrats' nomination for the U. S. Senate, so he started the Delaware Party, and in May it nominated him and other candidates for that November's election. In June the General Assembly passed, and the Democratic governor signed, a bill changing the law so as to make it harder for the Delaware Party to get its candidates on the ballot. The Party then asked Democratic AG Richard R. Wier Jr. for a ruling on the constitutionality of that law, and on August 30 he issued a written opinion to the state election commissioner citing 'Williams' and 'Storer' and ruling the new law valid; remember that in Delaware the AG's opinions have the force of law.

2: Paragraph 13 On 31 August McInerney sued the election commissioner and other officials, in federal court in Wilmington, to put him on the ballot as the nominee of the Delaware Party. AG Wier, representing the defendants, conceded without argument that the new Delaware statute was unconstitutional. On September 14 the federal court invalidated the statute and ordered the elections officials to put McInerney on the ballot. Two years later AG Wier ran for re-election, and that's where Craven's book ended.

2: Paragraph 14 In the 1982 election, two Democrats were elected who figure prominently in this book: Oberly became AG by a margin of 1177 votes over the Republican, with the American Party candidate and the Libertarian Party candidate totaling 1565 votes, and Thomas R. Carper became the Congressman, with Roth elected to the Senate.

2: Paragraph 15 That was around the time Carper divorced his first wife. I haven't heard any rumor that he beats his current wife, but several people who were their neighbors have told me he used to beat his first wife, and in their written settlement agreement he paid extra for her promise not to mention it anymore, and they said they knew that from their own observations and from what she told them. During the 1990 campaign, Carper's opponents' campaign managers told me that was true and that they had documentation that as early as his college days he beat up on the women he dated before he was married.

2: Paragraph 16 When I was checking dates for this section, I couldn't find the date of that divorce, so I called the public library in Wilmington and asked. That library's research desk is superlative - they take inquiries over the phone, and they've often answered such obscure trivia questions for me that I was almost embarrassed to ask them. After researching the question for most of a day, they called back to say Carper's divorce was between 1982 and 1984, but they couldn't find any reference to it anywhere, and they'd even called the local newspaper.

2: Paragraph 17 I hadn't really cared at first, but that made me start wondering: 'Who's Who' includes divorce dates in its listings (mine's in there), everybody knows Carper's been divorced, he's held high federal office since 1982, and he's already announced he's the Democratic candidate for governor this year, so he's a public figure whose biographical statistics are in the public domain - why the mystery? So I called his office here and asked what year he divorced his first wife, and his staff got all bent out of shape. They asked for my name, and I wouldn't give it, but I told them I was a registered voter who wanted to know. That drove them crazier. When one of them asked why I wanted to know, I said it was biographical info for an article I'm writing about the candidates in this year's election. Not only wouldn't they tell me when the divorce was, but then they wouldn't even talk to me anymore and said I couldn't talk to anyone but Carper's press secretary in Washington! Now I'm very curious about what Carper is trying to hide.

2: Paragraph 18 Anyhow, in 1986 Oberly was re-elected AG with 915 votes more than the Republican, and American Party candidate David S. DeRiemer got 1133 votes. DeRiemer is a colorful character, a businessman from the southern part of the state who feels so strongly about his rights that in 1988 he went to jail rather than agree the state could require him to have its permission, in the form of a driver's license, to drive a car. He's not a lawyer, and he doesn't drive anymore. His platform was to do away with the Federal Reserve Bank, but he never explained how Delaware's AG could affect the Federal Reserve; he has himself told me all the federal courts in the country are illegal because they're supposed to be the judicial branch, but they've gone over to the executive branch, as evidenced by the fact that they all have U. S. flags with gold fringes around them, and only the executive branch is allowed to have gold fringes on its flags.

2: Paragraph 19 After the 1986 election, DeRiemer joined the Libertarian Party, and he wanted to be its AG candidate in 1990. I didn't know about that in late 1989 when the Delaware Libertarian Party asked me to be its AG candidate, and I'd already agreed before I found out. Meanwhile, Oberly had decided to run for a third term: No Delaware AG had ever run for a third term, although nothing in the state constitution or laws forbids it; before Oberly, the only three who had run for a second term were: Buckson, who cashed in on the 1966 Republican landslide; Wier, who lost to Richard S. Gebelein in 1978; and Gebelein, who lost to Oberly in 1982 and is now a Superior Court judge.

2: Paragraph 20 In the grand tradition of Delaware politics, where the Establishment closes ranks against outsiders of any political persuasion, Oberly played both ends against the middle by cutting deals with both the Democrats and the Republicans to get re-elected. I heard each of the following stories from more than one member of the old guard of the respective party, who resented the way Oberly used the power of his office to preempt their parties out from under them, as well as from various lawyers and reporters who were outside observers.

2: Paragraph 21 Delaware law limits a governor to two four-year terms. In 1988 Republican Michael Castle was re-elected, and Republican Dale E. Wolf was elected lieutenant governor. The lt. governor had been Democrat S. B. "Landslide" Woo, so called because he won by a handful of votes on the recount of the 1984 election, but in 1988 he ran against Roth for the Senate.

2: Paragraph 22 Delaware has some fairly specific campaign-financing laws on its books, but like many sections of the Delaware Code, those statutes are considered unconstitutional, and therefore unenforceable, except when Oberly wants to convict a potential political rival. He is on record calling those statutes invalid insofar as they limit the amount he, as a candidate, can spend on his campaign. One provision prohibits campaign contributions of more than $1000 to statewide candidates.

2: Paragraph 23 In 1988 Castle's campaign committee had more than enough money for his re-election, but Wolf's didn't have enough for his harder-fought campaign, so Castle's committee covered some of Wolf's campaign expenditures, and the Democrat Wolf beat filed a complaint for violation of that provision. You know who enforces those laws: AG Oberly. He had spent the past couple of years convicting the Democrats who had controlled the state party of picayune violations of the contribution laws, so they were forced out of politics and, in one or two cases, went to jail. Now the Democrats wanted him to turn that same law against Wolf, who was being groomed to be the Republicans' candidate for governor in 1992.

2: Paragraph 24 The deal Oberly made with the Republicans was that he would clear Wolf of those charges, and the Republicans would run a nonviable candidate for AG in 1990, and if Wolf became governor in 1992 he would appoint Oberly a judge. After the Republicans did indeed nominate a stalking horse, Wilmington lawyer F. L. Peter Stone, on 1 May 1990 Oberly issued an opinion clearing Wolf. How the Democrats did howl! But the funniest part is that Wolf's other political problems caught up with him, and the Republicans dumped him and nominated Realtor B. Gary Scott. And Buckson got thrown off the bench of the Family Court for running for it without first resigning.

2: Paragraph 25 One of the reasons I believe that story is it fits all the circumstantial evidence. There's no question Oberly has admitted publicly he wants to be a judge when he leaves the AG's office. Had the Republicans wanted their AG candidate elected in 1990, Gov. Castle could have appointed Oberly a judge in 1989 and then appointed a Republican to fill out the term, and that Republican would have come into the 1990 campaign as an incumbent and surely have won re-election. But the charges against Wolf were still pending, and more Delaware voters are registered as Democrats than as Republicans: They would have resented Oberly's selling them out, if he dismissed those charges on his way out or the new AG dismissed them on the way in, and so voted against Wolf as a backlash. Nor is there any other reasonable explanation for nominating Stone, who is a nice guy but doesn't know which end is up; there were Republicans who had not only sufficient legal experience but also the required public relations skills: They should have nominated DAG M. Jane Brady to run against Oberly instead of against Senator Joseph R. Biden.

2: Paragraph 26 The deal Oberly made with the Democrats was he would help Carper oust the existing state party leaders, and if Carper was elected governor in 1992 he would appoint Oberly a judge. The Democrats were mad at Oberly for prosecuting party leaders, some for petty campaign financing violations and others for drunk driving. When Oberly was himself arrested for drunk driving, however, he had the charges dropped, and when his chief deputy Silverman was charged with hit-and-run, they'd had those charges dropped, too. Carper couldn't have taken over the party if Oberly hadn't cleared the way for him: The criminal prosecutions not only removed some major players but also intimidated everyone who was left. You could have made a fortune selling Maalox to Delaware Democrats between 1988 and 1990. Wilmington plumber Daniel D. Rappa made a valiant, but doomed, last-ditch effort by running against Carper in the 1990 primary.

2: Paragraph 27 No sketch of Delaware's political scene would be complete without some mention of the media situation: There is no television station in Delaware, and there are no competing newspapers. Most people have cable tv, and there's only one carrier serving each area; downstate gets broadcast channels from Salisbury MD, and Wilmington gets the Philadelphia PA channels and the NJ PBS channel. The ABC and PBS stations in Philly have studios in Wilmington, but Delaware and southern New Jersey get short shrift in the coverage on all Philly stations. (Northern Jersey gets just as little coverage from the New York City stations that supposedly serve it.) With an antenna in Wilmington you can pick up the Baltimore channels.

2: Paragraph 28 The cable carrier in Wilmington is Heritage, and downstate it's mostly Storer. The utilities commission that set the terms with the carriers sold out the citizenry by not providing for free public access. There's only leased access, and Heritage keeps raising its rates and downgrading its production services, thus decreasing access.

2: Paragraph 29 There's only one daily newspaper left in Wilmington, the 'News Journal' owned by Gannett, and the 'Delaware State News' is published in Dover. There are several radio stations around the state, and they're the best source of local Delaware news.

2: Paragraph 30 The 'News Journal' is the handmaiden of the Establishment and generally manipulates its coverage to present the party line. During the 1990 campaign it endorsed Oberly and mostly ignored my candidacy except for an occasional deliberate distortion of the facts. The PBS station reneged on its promise to include me in its candidates' debate, apparently on Oberly's instructions, and the ABC station refused to let me debate Oberly and Stone, but after I complained to the FCC, the station put me on for an equal amount of time weeks later. Storer refused to accept my commercials until the FCC told them the law required them to, but they still refused to sell me the time slots I wanted. The radio stations were unfailingly cooperative, and WILM was unexpectedly supportive. At a candidates' debate sponsored by a radio station in Dover I met the president of Delaware's chapter of NOW, and he endorsed me on the air after the debate. In May 1991 I ran into him, and he said afterward Oberly called him and said as AG he could make things bad for NOW for endorsing me. I was flattered.

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