BRIAN CHILSON
THE
2ND DISTRICT POST-GRIFFIN It’s shaping up to be a real horserace in 2014. BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK
R
ichard Nixon once said, “I am not a crook.” Tim Griffin said, “I am not a zookeeper.” Griffin is leaving Washington, though on his own terms, not unceremoniously like Nixon. And unlike Nixon, his tricks (and those played on his behalf) came before he held office, not during. The 2nd District congressman’s zookeeping reference came in a talk at the Clinton School in May 2007. He’d just resigned as interim U.S. attorney after the publication of an article about Griffin’s involvement in GOP caging — disqualifying likely Democratic voters who’ve moved from their registered addresses — in 2004 in Florida. Asked about it, Griffin said he said he didn’t know
what caging was. That he had to look it up. C’mon. The protege of Bush White House trickster extraordinare Karl Rove didn’t know what caging was? Caging was one thing. The more immediate problem Griffin faced was how he’d gotten the U.S. attorney job — through machinations by the Justice Department, finagling that threw U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins under the bus so Griffin could be installed. Griffin wept during the talk at the school. He said public service “was not worth” the public scrutiny he’d come under and the cost to his family. He didn’t know how long-term public servants could do it. He said he and his wife had not been able to enjoy the news that she was pregnant.
More bad press was to come: The DOJ’s report a year later confirming that Cummins had been removed not for poor performance but to make way for Griffin. Emails that contradicted the DOJ’s earlier assertion that Karl Rove had not been involved. It was at his direction that Griffin got a job that would launch his political career. Then, in 2008, a swarthy Muslim socialist was elected president — or that’s how a previously quiet and shockingly large faction of American society saw it. The wave of anti-Obama feeling in Arkansas in 2010 took that baggage and swept it to sea and Griffin into Congress representing the state’s 2nd District. It did not hurt that his Democratic opponent was Joyce Elliott, female, liberal, African American. CONTINUED ON PAGE 18 www.arktimes.com
NOVEMBER 7, 2013
17