Ben Quayle is having a bad week. The political newbie running for the Republican nomination for Arizona's 3rd Congressional District is learning that being the frontrunner with a lot of money and name recognition brings with it certain scrutiny that can be a trifle unwelcome.
Ben Quayle is having a bad week. Dan and Marilyn’s son, who is running in the crowded Republican primary to succeed the mercifully retiring John Shadegg, was probably the front-runner until a few days ago. His donor list is a walk down memory lane: there’s George HW Bush hosting a fundraiser for Ben; the donor list to Ben’s campaign included Donald Rumsfeld and Andy Card. In the money sweepstakes, Quayle turned in a strong 2nd quarter fundraising report. He’s raised $1.1 million compared to $800,000 for the next best fundraiser in AZ-3.
None of that was sitting too well with the 10 opponents in the primary field, who really didn’t like the fact that political neophyte Quayle, an Arizona newcomer who has never voted in an Arizona election, was stealing their thunder. It particularly didn’t sit well with Vernon Parker, an African-American conservative Republican who has had some, er, ethical challenges as a contractor for the SBA (well, actually he has been accused by the SBA of lying to get government contracts for minority-owned businesses – which in itself seems like pretty good fodder for his Republican opponents to rail against).
First, Quayle sent out a campaign ad showing the happy candidate with his lovely wife and two darling girls. In the flyer, Quayle proclaimed how delighted he was that he would be raising his family in Arizona. Only....they weren’t his daughters. He is only recently married and has no children. Parker accused him of "renting kids" and trying to fool the public into believing they were his kids. He clearly was doing so, or at least didn’t do anything to dispel the inevitable conclusion that they were his kids, but in doing so he was only following in Shadegg’s footsteps. Shadegg, you may recall, shamelessly produced a darling little girl on the House floor when he gave one of the sillier speeches against the health care bill. You had to listen carefully for him to admit that she wasn’t his granddaughter, but was instead the daughter of his chief of staff. At least these kids were, technically, Quayle’s "family," being his nieces.
So, when Quayle issued a press release noting Parker’s ethical challenges and referring to him as likely to become the "national poster boy" for Democrats harping on Republican ethical failings, Parker accused Quayle of using "racist" terminology. "Boy." Get it? Parker said Quayle was a racist because, among other things, Quayle could have said "national poster child." That didn’t gain a lot of traction, but it certainly threw Quayle on the defensive.
But it gets worse. A day or two later, "someone" tipped Politico off that Quayle had helped found a racy website called "Dirty Scottsdale," which has since been folded into TheDirty.com. Moreover, Quayle allegedly blogged on the website as Brock Landers (a reference to a character in Boogie Nights) about his trials, tribulations, and occasional successes in trying to get laid by the "hottest chicks" in the Scottsdale nightclub scene. Quayle initially denied it, then refused to answer the question about whether he and Brock were one and the same, and then acknowledged that he had participated in Dirty Scottsdale. That’s not sitting too terribly well with the family-values types, but we’ll see. So far, Parker himself seems to have gotten a pass despite his substantial legal problems.
Not sure what the new Mrs. Quayle has to say about all that, but mostly it’s been treated as a source of amusement out here. The strangest thing is that in an eleven-person race and no runoff, someone with as little as 9.2% of the vote could win. The winner will probably win the general, although there is a credible candidate, Jon Hulburd, on the Democratic side, who has plenty of money and a lot of support from the business community.