Republicans promote their “Young Guns” Congressional candidates as “the best opportunity to move our country in the right direction.” Founded in 2007 by Reps. Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan, the “Young Guns” program aims to recruit and promote “a new generation of conservative leaders.” But before even getting to Congress, a number of this year’s “Young Guns” and “Contenders” have found themselves fending off scandals, struggling to explain past actions and in one particular case, being outed as a ducky pajama enthusiast.
Let’s review some of the most embattled “Young Guns.”
A “Young Gun” running for Congress in Florida, Allen West has recently come under scrutiny for his relationship with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, a group targeted by the FBI for involvement in “violent crimes” and “attempted murder.” According to NBC, West has invited group members to a “campaign bike ride,” has had members guard him in an interview, and has spoken at a rally organized by people who claimed to be affiliated with the Outlaws.
West has fought the scandal however, pointing out to Hotline On Call that he could not possibly be a member of the group, because they don’t admit black people (or Jews, or gays).
At a recent event, some leather-clad security men ejected a Democratic tracker, but West said they were not Outlaws.
According to David Harmer’s bio on the “Young Guns” website, he is “a businessman and fiscally conservative business attorney” with an “expertise in constitutional law.” He also wants to abolish public schools. Last week, Mother Jones reported that Harmer had written an op-ed in The San Fransisco Chronicle back in 2000, arguing against “the government school monopoly” and yearning for the education system that existed in the “first century of American nationhood, when literacy levels among all classes, at least outside the South, matched or exceeded those prevailing now.”
“[T]he public school system does more to interfere with learning than to promote it,” Harmer wrote in his article.
Auto magnate and Ohio Republican congressional candidate Tom Ganley is a “Young Gun” running against Rep. Betty Sutton. A few weeks ago, a woman filed a civil suit accusing him of sexual assault. Among the documents the woman included in the suit was a letter she wrote to Ganley, who she met at a Tea Party rally.
“I came to you as a customer and you treated me like a hooker,” she wrote to Ganley in a letter in October 2009. “You are no different than the Democrats.”
“These are baseless allegations, the only motive being to extort money and to cause political harm to a good and decent man,” Ganley’s lawyer, Steve Dever, told The Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Jeff Perry is the lone “Young Gun” from Massachusetts. In May, The Boston Globe reported on Perry’s time as a police sergeant in Wareham, MA in the early 1990s, when he was the supervising officer of a cop who at least twice conducted illegal strip searches of female teenage suspects. The official complaint of the first incident, from 1991, alleges Perry “observed the strip search” but “did nothing to protect her.”
This month, the DCCC released a brutal ad highlighting the incident. “Imagine your teenage daughter illegally strip-searched by police,” the ad says.
Watch:
Florida “Young Gun” David M. Rivera has been dogged by allegations that a woman filed a petition for a domestic-violence restraining order against him in 1994. Rivera denies that he is the same David M. Rivera involved in that case, but the story is quite complicated. The woman, Jenia Dorticos, says she doesn’t know the politician Rivera. Rivera says any suggestion that he was involved in the case “is a blatant and shameful lie.” But records show that Dorticos’ mother worked on one of Rivera’s campaigns. And a woman told the Miami Herald that Dorticos and Rivera came to her house once for a dinner party. What is certain is that in 2002, Rivera the politician drove his car into a truck carrying negative campaign leaflets that called him a proponent of domestic violence.
Ohio congressional candidate Rich Iott wasn’t a full-fledged “Young Gun” — he was just a “Contender” — but he’s the only candidate on this list to have fouled things up so badly that the party was forced to scrub him from the program’s website. Two weeks ago, Iott was outed as a Nazi reenactor, and pictures emerged of him dressed as a member of Hitler’s Waffen SS. Not good for optics.
Hope for Iott, however: a PAC chaired by House Republican Leader John Boehner still supports him.
Another “Contender,” and this one is still listed. Texas congressional candidate Blake Farenthold has done more work than anyone this year to dispel the notion that ducky pajamas are a dealbreaker for scantily clad women.
