Some Perspective on the Nunez Situation

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

I have watched with interest over recent days as Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez has been pummeled over expenditures from his campaign fund to pay for foreign trips and the costs related thereto. I didn’t accompany Nunez on any of his travels, and hence don’t know about the purpose of all the expenditures in question. But I do have enough first-hand experience in this area to know that a public official often is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. <> <>While serving as communications director for Ohio Gov. Richard F. Celeste in the late ‘80s, I accompanied him on trade missions to Asia (several times), the then-Soviet Union and Canada. Part of my portfolio was overseeing the communications aspects of the domestic and international marketing efforts of Ohio state government. Each time planning commenced for a future trade mission, there was a recurring internal debate about how to pay for the trips. Some felt these trips constituted perfectly legitimate government business, and therefore the travel and other costs should be paid out of the Governor’s Office budget, or out of the state Department of Development’s budget. Others recommended raising private funds for the trips, especially from companies and individuals that would be included in the governor’s traveling party. Still others argued that some of the costs should be subsidized by the governor’s campaign committee, out of an excess of caution. <> <>Any way an elected official "goes," he will be castigated by someone, including the media. If the state pays the costs, then it was a "taxpayer-funded junket." If private funds pay all or part of the cost, it will be labeled a "privately funded boondoggle with rich friends and traveling partners seeking access and favors." If the campaign account of the officeholder subsidizes the jaunts, then they are "a questionable use of campaign funds" – accompanied by allegations that the whole trip was undertaken mainly for political, not economic development, motives. When Gray Davis was governor, I did not work for the state but served as his chief political advisor, with my services paid for out of his campaign committee. When Davis went on his first trade mission in 1999, a major hop-scotch through Europe and the Middle East, I declined to go, despite my previous experience with gubernatorial trade missions, for fear that my very presence would lead to criticism that the purpose of the trip was overtly political. The governor’s travel was paid for out of a non-profit foundation set up expressly for that purpose. And even thought the donors to that entity were voluntarily disclosed, Davis still got grief for using private funds to travel internationally.<> <>I would also argue, in defense of Nunez (and Governor Schwarzenegger, too, for that matter), that it is important for California’s high elected officials to show the Bear Republic flag around the globe, given California’s dependence on foreign trade and markets. In 2003, in a misguided fit of budget cutting, the Legislature axed all of the state’s long-time trade offices around the world (with the exception of a privately funded one in, of all places, Armenia). This left the Golden State as one of the very few states with no on-the-ground presence in the major trading capitols of the world, including China and Japan.There's more...