Joe Conason: GOP finance chief's background in dubious "charity"

[babylonsister]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joe_conason/2010/03/11/bickhart/index.html


GOP finance chief's background in dubious "charity"
Joe Conason

Rob Bickhart, the finance chief whose weird anti-Obama PowerPoint embarrassed the GOP, has a strange resume


Decent Republicans were embarrassed and disturbed last week by exposure of the bizarre fundraising presentation at their party's Boca Raton, Fla., retreat -- and now they are facing questions about the GOP's exorbitant payments to Rob Bickhart, the Republican National Committee finance director responsible for this fiasco. It seems that party chairman Michael Steele (and whoever else was responsible for hiring Bickhart) failed to adequately vet the consultant before bringing him on staff last year. Back home in Pennsylvania, where he worked closely with Rick Santorum and the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, his ethical record was splotched.

Specifically, Bickhart oversaw a "charitable" foundation set up by Santorum, known as Operation Good Neighbor, which shared both staff and space with Santorum's own Senate political action committee, confusingly called America's Foundation.

In early 2006, dubious spending by both entities came under sharp scrutiny by the American Prospect (where I was then the investigative editor) and the Philadelphia Daily News, which jointly published a two-part examination of Santorum's tangled finances by reporter/blogger Will Bunch.

What Bunch found wasn't very edifying, especially for a politician who had just been named to rewrite ethics rules for the Senate Republicans in the aftermath of the Jack Abramoff scandal. The Operation Good Neighbor Foundation, billed by Santorum as a "compassionate conservative" project to uplift the poor, was raking in money but spending most of the proceeds on overhead, salaries and fundraising, with relatively little devoted to actual charitable endeavors:

snip//

Under Bickhart's direction, in other words, Santorum's tax-exempt nonprofit "charity" filled the wallets of his political operatives while shortchanging the poor. The story provoked immediate revulsion. The Washington Post ran a strong editorial complaining that outfits like Operation Good Neighbor were marred by "an inevitable element of extortion" and noting its shoddy self-dealing. Santorum stepped aside as the Senate leadership's ethics spokesman and lost his bid for reelection.

Four years later, everybody associated with that dingy episode is back in business, thanks to short memories and enduring gall.

Bickhart is collecting huge fees on top of a big salary at the RNC, where Chairman Steele has now asked him to investigate his own misconduct. Santorum raised well over a million dollars for his still-active PAC last year, which he is using to promote himself as a potential presidential nominee. Just the other day, he addressed a major religious right group in Iowa, where he was introduced by none other than Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition leader and Abramoff crony -- who is also trying to refurbish his career.

If Republicans worry about the party's lousy public image, they should ask themselves why figures like Bickhart, Reed and Santorum always prosper in their midst -- and why such political grifters are never punished or ostracized.