Friday, May 7, 2004 | 5:56 a.m.
Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at [email protected].
WEEKEND EDITION
May 8 - 9, 2004
"The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today
And black's white today
And day's night today"
-- Cole Porter
1934
THE MAN WHO has made a career of making bad look good and black look white tries this week to practice the twisted alchemy he successfully transferred from the courtroom to City Hall.
When Mayor Oscar Goodman faces the state Ethics Commission on Wednesday and Thursday, he surely will deploy all the rhetorical tricks that made him so useful to the mob and so successful as a politician. He will dissemble, divert and decry as he attempts to transmogrify a clear-cut pattern of unseemly and unethical behavior into innocuous attempts to show his love for his son and his devotion to the city.
Goodman's behavior, as he promoted his son's business and used city property to do so, presents the Ethics Commission with a unique opportunity. The panelists can demonstrate the value of the much-maligned commission by drawing a clear line between public duty and private shenanigans and by sending a message that a politician's immense popularity does not shield him from punishment for blatant transgressions.
The ethics commissioners also can show that they take such outrageous conduct very seriously, as opposed to how Goodman has treated the charges, which also include a serial flouting of ethics laws as he has funneled money to his wife's school with a gin endorsement, directed online shoppers to a magazine's Web site and taken a Cadillac so he could be squired around like some royal personage.
In response to the controversy, Goodman has manufactured evidence as he has tried to kill the messengers, impugning the integrity of those who dared to challenge him. He has drafted the city attorney's office to do legal research for his defense, even though Brad Jerbic & Co. don't represent him. And in a technique designed to induce his adoring public not to take the charges seriously, Goodman has treated the allegations as fodder for his long-running, very popular vaudeville act.
The mayor has given speeches in which he shoots off one-liners about helping his sons. More recently he rubbed a dwarf's head for good luck.
"We got a midget. We can't lose (before the ethics panel) now," His Honor whooped 10 days ago, as reported by Sun columnist Timothy McDarrah. Goodman followed that obscenity by high-fiving his faux chief of staff.
Get it folks: It's all a big joke, the mayor's practice of using his office for self and family aggrandizement. If you laugh along, you, too, won't take it seriously.
What this case is really about resides in those bizarre, Nixonian words that were Goodman's first public utterances once he learned the Ethics Commission was moving forward. What seemed at the time like a non sequitur actually defines the case and we saw Goodman's subconscious realization of that bubble to the surface. "I want to make it very, very clear that as mayor of the city of Las Vegas, I am going to run the city the way I want to run the city," Goodman thundered on April 2.
That is, he is going to continue to make the council-manager form of government irrelevant, use his office to benefit himself and his family and transform the city into a taxpayer-funded public relations machine for Oscar B. Goodman. If the ethics panelists want to sanction that, so be it.
Or they could show the emperor of Las Vegas has no clothes, stripping this case down to the facts, chastising His Honor for his diversionary tactics and holding him accountable for his actions. And perhaps they could point out how crass it is for an elected official to endorse commercial products, whether or not they are tied to his family and especially when the benefits to the city are marginal or nonexistent.
As with most high-profile ethics cases, the violations here are obvious, and Goodman's self-incriminating words will be flung back at him.
He has bragged about his role in promoting iPolitix, the company run by Ross Goodman and Councilman Michael Mack, and he has been unrepentant, repeatedly saying he will do it again. Will the ethics panel allow him to do so?
The iPolitix case is easily made. Goodman the Younger would never had this opportunity to make money if Daddy hadn't helped with a promotional disc by handing over city property (Violation No. 1) and arranged to get mayors to a party in Washington, D.C. (Violation No. 2).
The other issues also contain some obvious ethical lapses, including questions about why the mayor ignored the city attorney's advice and took the Cadillac anyhow; why the mayor's office charged taxpayers for video news releases and overtime when Goodman celebrated his gin deal with Bombay Sapphire; and why the mayor had the city attorney, who supposedly works for taxpayers, running interference for him in this case.
Goodman clearly believes he can run the city however he wants and that he can do whatever he wants with impunity. There are no boundaries to push, no bar is set too low.
That is exactly why the Ethics Commission must speak loudly and clearly, indelibly draw the line and set the precedent for others to follow. If not, the ethics panelists will be saying what Oscar Goodman has been saying and what Cole Porter was saying:
Anything goes.
archive
