Sticky Wiki

Reed Broderson.

The Rene Gonzalez Wiki incident drags on. And everybody involved looks bad. Gonzalez's haters are determined to paint him as a crook, by making an enormous stink out of a couple of relatively minor matters. He's crying foul, when he obviously screwed up and should just own up to it, apologize, and make restitution. But maybe the biggest reprobate in the picture is the city auditor's office, which is not handling the matter well at all.

The scene is a familiar one. A bunch of Portland lefties make sport every election by hurling accusations that their nemesis du jour has violated the local campaign finance rules. Sarah Yada Yada Yadaroni spent most of the last weeks of her mayoral campaign dragging Dud Wheeler into court over some alleged breach or other. When Gonzalez ran for City Council, his opponents were after him for getting free rent from a real estate tycoon. This time the main allegation is that Gonzalez wrongfully used city money to have his Wikipedia page edited to make him a more presentable mayoral candidate. The haters also did a "gotcha" on him for not having a disclaimer on a campaign banner, but misuse of city funds is a more serious matter. That said, in the grand scheme of things not a lot of money was involved.

I don't know what his opposition is so afraid of. All the guy has done at City Hall is speak the truth to a wall of incompetence and indifference. Maybe they haven't noticed, but he hasn't made much of a dent in the status quo. At least not yet. But he's exposed the county chair as an incompetent, and threatening to break the cycle of poor leadership at City Hall.

So on and on they have pressed with the complaint about the Wiki infraction, determined to keep it in the headlines in the hope that the voters will turn away from the guy and fall in with their darling, the tragically clueless Carmen Rubio. And the city auditor's office has more or less done the far-lefties' bidding.

Of course, Gonzo has no one to blame but himself. He used city money to have some consultant make changes to his Wiki page to make sure he didn't appear too far right. When he was called out on it, he should have had his campaign pay the money back that day, and issued an apology. But for some reason, he didn't, sputtering instead about how the edit was really official business. And so here we are weeks later, reading about it for the umpteenth time.

To me, the worst part of what he did was pay anybody to edit a Wiki page. Your average seventh grader can do that on their own. And he reportedly shelled out $6400 for a mere eight edits to the page. That's $800 per edit. Doesn't he have in-house campaign people who can suss out what the needed changes are, and get them made, for less than that?

But as I say, the city auditor, Simone Rede, comes out of this looking the worst. First, Rede recused herself because she's running for reelection herself, and she wants us to believe that somehow that creates a disqualifying conflict of interest. Really? If that's true, it would mean that the city auditor can't perform one of her most important tasks, monitoring campaign finance, for about a fifth of her term or more. I find it hard to believe that that's what the city charter or state law requires or intends.

Then, absurdly, they traded a weak conflict of interest for a far worse one. The deputy auditor who took over the case, Reed Brodersen (pictured), is apparently an ex-boyfriend of, and current co-owner of a house with, one of the bigwigs in the anti-Gonzalez movement. Who does he think he is, Clarence Thomas? Broderson refused to recuse himself, Rede didn't force him to step down, and the deputy wrote the latest scathing report on the Wiki caper. Gonzalez's complaints about the conflict are included as part of the findings that he interfered with the investigation.

Or should I say investigations, plural. First the deputy found that no rules had been broken. But it was a close call, he said. So he sent it off to Salem for one if those black-hole "probes." Meanwhile, Broderson's ex's friends produced some new "evidence," and now, a day or two after the ballots arrived in voters' homes, suddenly a revised ruling is released that Gonzo's guilty and must pay a fine. Just in case you missed it.

It's not clear what will happen now. When they busted Gonzalez's chops during his City Council race, he appealed and won. I'm not sure he'd win this time, and at this point, whatever damage is going to be done, has been done.

I've said for a long time that they ought to close the Oregon Zoo. Portland politics being what they are, a zoo is superfluous. And a dozen or so new critters are about to arrive at City Hall.