The Outstater
Purdue’s Ethics Expert
WE AREN’T EXPERTS here on the ethics of politics, although we grant that there may be such a thing. Politics and ethics seem too juxtaposed in the journalistic firmament for us to manage the intellectual span.
Andy Downs, however, is such an expert. He is the director of the Center for Indiana Politics at Purdue University Fort Wayne. The bright and affable Downs is routinely — reflexively, even — quoted by the mainstream media as the premier authority on Indiana political impropriety.
But the expertise is, as they say, skewed. The Democrat Party predictably falls just inside his ethical boundaries, more about which later. In short, if there is a news story questioning the ethics of a Republican, you can bet Andy Downs will be quoted recommending that the poor sap be put in the stocks.
So we were not surprised some years ago to read that Downs, being quoted as the state’s ethics expert, could not bring himself to absolve a GOP legislator on the presumption of a corrupted vote. That was so even though the legislator waived his commission on a title insurance deal that he dutifully reported, all of which was back in the news this week in connection with a trial over legislative links to casinos (you could have knocked us over with a feather).
Now, there’s a lot to worry about these days but a legislator who openly conducted a title search for a regular customer is low on the list.
Indeed, the Center for Economic Accountability says that companies making more secretive campaign donations than that are four times more likely to get “economic development” tax breaks than those who do not, plus the subsidies are more than 60 percent larger on average.
And if Downs, the ethics expert, would drive the few blocks from his office to the Fort Wayne City Hall he would find the names of two dozen or more architects, engineers and lawyers who quietly gave to his mayor’s reelection fund and then received municipal contracts (sometimes they had a “cousin” make the contribution.)
Did I mention that the mayor is a Democrat, who, incidentally, appoints all three members of the city’s ethics commission, one of whom, the city attorney, he suddenly fired this week for undisclosed reasons?
That would seem to be grist for an ethic expert’s mill.
On other matters, Downs could look up the legislative leadership on IndianaScorecard.org and compare their campaign donations with their votes (if he could figure out from where exactly the donations originated). And he could ask why the Speaker of the House needs to raise nearly a half million dollars for an easy reelection campaign. Or he could help our Margaret Menge dig into what is going on with Indiana voting machines.
Perhaps Downs would like to examine how the legislative campaign committees work, that is, why a donor cannot be certain where, how or by whom their donation will be used or who in a given session makes those decisions. And, considering the risk to election integrity, do we really need absentee balloting and why do some oppose tightening voter identification?
And what do Indiana governors do on those summer trips overseas when they say they are looking for jobs for us — really?
Finally, Downs could design polls that actually predict election outcomes. He missed the Trump phenomena by a mile (Downs might not know any Republicans), predicting that Ted Cruz would win 45 percent of the primary vote here and Trump 29 percent. In fact, Trump defeated Cruz so decisively in Indiana, 52.8 percent to 36.7 percent, that Cruz suspended his campaign and took himself out of the running nationally.
Downs, though, never has to take himself or his $77,000 salary out of the running. And that of course is the mark of a true expert. — tcl
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