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The Trouble with Larry?

- June 23, 2009

“The Politico has a peculiar article”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23912.html which sort of hints at something funny between U.Va political scientist and frequent media commenter Larry Sabato, and former Congressman Virgil Goode and the guy who beat him, Tom Periello:

bq. The race that took Sabato by surprise was close to home: In Virginia’s 5th Congressional District — which includes Sabato’s University of Virginia Center for Politics, in Charlottesville — a young, long-shot Thomas Perriello defeated the courtly, six-term Virgil Goode by the slimmest of margins.

bq. Goode had been more than just a congressman to Sabato. The men are friends dating back to their college days, and Goode was also a benefactor, sending earmarks of up to $1.4 million per year to an educational program run out of the Center for Politics. With Goode’s defeat, that funding abruptly dried up. This year, Perriello rejected the center’s application for $1 million, and Sabato’s aides are scrambling to find an alternate source of money.

bq. Sabato said he doesn’t know why he lost his funding and says he’s never let a personal or financial relationship get in the way of calling them as he sees them. Perriello spokeswoman Jessica Barba said the funding denial had nothing to do with Sabato’s skepticism of Perriello’s prospects, or Sabato’s friendship with Goode, or even the fact that Sabato’s current spokesman, Cordel Faulk, is considering a challenge to Perriello in 2010.

Now, there are many odd things about the article, including the description of Goode as “courtly” given his notoriously robust opinions on such topics as Muslim members of Congress (is the adjective some sort of roundabout way of describing him as a Southern gentleman?), but the strangest is that I am simply not sure what the article is trying to suggest. The article never lays out a clear case, but sort of hints in the direction of three forms of unseemliness, not all of which are compatible with each other:

(1) That Larry Sabato possibly cooked the books in favor of his friend when he predicted that Goode was a shoo-in to retain his seat.

(2) That the funding relationship between Congress and Sabato’s center was in some respects unorthodox.

(3) That Tom Perriello’s decision not to renew the earmark for Sabato’s center might have been retaliation for Sabato’s prediction (and for the fact that a key figure in the center may challenge him next time around).

Of these, there seems to be no evidence supporting (1). I am acquainted with a significant number of people whose attitude to former Congressman Goode ranges the somewhat limited gamut between strong detestation and violent loathing. None of them, as best as I can recall, estimated Periello’s chances as greater than ‘he seems like a great guy, and you never know, he might just make it.’ If Sabato was wrong on this, he was wrong together with a lot of other people.

In contrast, there may be a bit more to (2), but I would like to see a lot more evidence. As best as I read the article, Goode wasn’t the only Congressman handing out earmarks in an idiosyncratic fashion. And that the earmark went to Sabato’s center directly rather than U.Va is not astounding – in my admittedly limited understanding, university funding people act like starved, feral weasels when large amounts of federal money are on the table, and are often willing to tolerate unusual institutional arrangements if it helps expedite the money flow. At most, this seems to me to be a ‘bears further investigation’ or a ‘the system of earmarks is generally rather dubious’ story rather than smoking gun evidence of anything funny going on.

And the suggestion that Perriello might be somehow retaliating against Sabato or others in the center by not renewing the grant seems to me to be downright absurd. If this earmark was channelled to help out one of Goode’s mates, there is no reason why Perriello _should_ have renewed it, challenger or no challenger. Indeed, it would have been quite surprising if he _had_ renewed it.

I understand that the pressures at Politico to write, write, write and get your stuff into the pipeline are intense. But usually, when I read a story, I want there to be a _story_ to the story. I’m not sure what it is here. And this is not because I’m especially fond of Larry Sabato (whom I don’t know), or keen on protecting my discipline (I am not a great fan of the particular ways in which Sabato engages in the public sphere – but then, I am sure that there are other political scientists who don’t like my blogging much either). And it could be that there is some deeper set of irregularities happening here – but this story simply doesn’t give me a clue as to what they might be.