Call it Partisan Reflex Syndrome (PRS), which is a 50-cent pseudo-medical term we just made up for a malady as seasonal as the common cold. It tends to come back with every election, like a political version of the sniffles. And the symptoms grow more pronounced the closer election day comes.
PRS cropped up the other day when, thanks to Arkansas' good ol' Freedom of Information Act, it was revealed that the state's Department of Human Services had been fooling around with Leslie Rutledge's personnel file. It seems her file had been changed more than a week after she'd resigned as an attorney with the state Department of Human Services back in 2007--but no one there had bothered to tell her about it.
Sneaky. But it sounds like tricky business as (all too) usual at DHS, a regular source of scandal in state government. The stories coming out of the department's juvenile detention center at Alexander had already made weeks of headlines by the time this tidbit about Leslie Rutledge's personnel file made the day's news.
"Please put a do-not-rehire on Leslie," a staff attorney named Lisa McGee had written in an email that was found in Counselor Rutledge's file. Why? No reason was specifically stated, but her departure was listed as a Code 21, the number assigned workers who leave their job because of "gross misconduct," which was left unspecified.
Was it because she quit after a 14-month stint at the department to join Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign back in 2007? Was her reputation being tarred because she was leaving the state's Democratic administration to campaign for a Republican? Or just because she left without giving as much notice as somebody at the department would have liked? Her now changed personnel file offers few if any clues. And the file might not have come to light even now if she weren't running for attorney general on her own.
Once she did find out about it, Ms. Rutledge didn't sound all too happy about her file's being rewritten without her knowledge. "Whether it was politically motivated because I was going to work for a Republican governor and these individuals were [working] for a Democrat, I don't know. It's clear that they went back and scratched it and [my resignation] went from voluntary to not. That's something as attorney general that I'll look into." It would also be good to know if others have been treated the same way by DHS' bureaucrats.
But none of that seemed to bother her Democratic opponent, a state legislator from Nashville by the name of Nate Steel. "I have been hoping since the beginning," he said, "that others would pay closer attention to her background and qualifications for the office." Which is just what those of us who went digging into DHS' files did. The result wasn't pretty: a state agency that changes an employee's file after she's resigned--without giving her a chance to respond, or even to know her record had been changed, and she was now being tagged a Code 21. Maybe a Franz Kafka could explain it--a mysterious verdict issued on mysterious grounds, which sounds a lot like the byzantine plot of his dystopic novel The Trial.
Not that Nate Steel objected to her being treated this way; his PRS kicked in at once. Do you think that's how Nate Steel is going to treat his staff should he become Arkansas' next attorney general? Anybody he offers a staffer's job might like to know beforehand. Or even afterward. Let's hope their treatment would be fairer than Leslie Rutledge's, which was not only vindictive but secretive.
But now we know about the file and its being changed, thanks to still another of the reforms Winthrop Rockefeller instituted when he cleaned up his adopted state after years of Faubus misrule. And his Freedom of Information Act was scarcely the least of Mr. Rockefeller's contributions to good government in Arkansas, for it keeps on ticking, and keeping state government as transparent as an FOI Act can make it.
This little revelation is only the most recent indication that this year's campaign season is revving up, and there'll doubtless be a lot more of this kind of thing as the campaign intensifies. Another day, another minor symptom that indicates a major election campaign is heating up--the way a tickle in the throat can develop into a raging fever.
Our Rx: Take a couple of aspirin and call us in the morning--the morning after the election. By then this tempest over a personnel file will surely have passed, and can be seen in perspective. If anybody is still interested in it.
Editorial on 09/17/2014