Hide the Foley Angle? 2: WashPost Skips Rapist Brother-in-Law in Massachusetts Story

The other governor’s race in America with a Mark Foley echo is in Massachusetts, where Democratic hopeful Deval Patrick, a former Clinton Justice Department official, whom the Washington Post profiled on Wednesday in a feature by staff writer Wil Haygood that was so positive, a liberal blogger characterized it as a "sweet send off for him...I hope he can feel the tail wind."

One reason was that Haygood and the Post completely excluded in this long, 77-paragraph piece how Patrick was embarrassed by an October 13 Boston Herald report by Dave Wedge that Patrick’s brother-in-law was an unregistered sex offender: "a convicted rapist who has been notified by officials that he is in violation of laws that require sex offenders to register with the state...Bernard Sigh was convicted in 1993 in San Diego of raping his wife, Rhonda, who is Patrick’s sister. He pleaded guilty, served a short jail sentence and was put on five years probation, officials said. The Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board sent Sigh a letter this week alerting him that he is required to register."

A Patrick spokesman told the Herald "Patrick was ‘unaware’ his brother-in-law was required to register as a sex offender and that Sigh is reviewing his court records and the law. "If he is, in fact, legally obligated to register, he plans to do so immediately’....Since his release from jail, Sigh and Patrick’s 51-year-old sister have reconciled. They are avid churchgoers who counsel couples in crisis. The Sighs have two children."

This left open the question why a repentant Mr. Sigh would fail to register with the state since moving in eight years ago, not to mention the Foley angle again – wouldn’t a brother-in-law who would not claim he was unacquainted with the criminal offense tell his relative it was politically dangerous for him to go unregistered? Or did they hope no one would find out? (The Boston Globe screeched against this invasion of a "private process" -- a process that never proceeded until now.) Perhaps Patrick thought the press would be a pack of helpful censors, like Wil Haygood and the Washington Post.

In paragraph 52, Haygood does flit over Republican opponent Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey and her campaign for four paragraphs, which included the other case where Patrick's mysterious record on violent crime is a campaign issue:

The Healey camp has criticized Patrick as being soft on crime, contends he will raise taxes to support new programs and will coddle illegal immigrants by allowing them to get driver's licenses and be eligible for in-state college tuition.

The Healey camp has recently mentioned the case of Benjamin LaGuer, a man of black and Puerto Rican ancestry convicted of tying up and raping a 59-year-old neighbor in 1983. Patrick and many others, among them novelist William Styron, once signed letters questioning the fairness of LaGuer's trial. In 2002, DNA evidence proved LaGuer was at the crime scene.

Both Healey and Romney have suffered mightily from fallout from the Big Dig construction project, a downtown tunnel and highway project that was originally supposed to cost $2.6 billion and has since ballooned to $14 billion. In August, a piece of concrete fell on a passenger in a car traveling along the artery and killed her.

There is a longer list of particulars that display how favorably Haygood treated Patrick and the Democrats in this long puff piece.

1. Haygood noted about Patrick: "If he's successful, Patrick would not be the first black elected statewide in Massachusetts. That distinction belongs to Edward Brooke, who in 1966 became the first black elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction." Haygood forgot to note that Brooke was also a Republican -- a centrist, but someone Hillary Clinton decried to his face for backing Nixon and the Vietnam War at her Wellesley graduation.

2. Haygood played up a racist climate in politics from the case of Willie Horton, whom Haygood accurately characterized as a murderer and rapist, but became a "seminal figure in anti-crime ads," and "there were those who thought Bush was pandering to racial fears." This is recycling of ancient misinformation. The Bush campaign never produced an ad with the name or face of Willie Horton, although several independent-expenditure groups did.

3. Haygood summarized Patrick's Clinton service this way:

In 1994 President Clinton nominated Patrick to become assistant attorney general for civil rights. They were riveting and edgy times: Conservatives launched attacks against affirmative action; a wave of black church and synagogue burnings erupted in the South, echoes from another era, when burnings and bombings haunted America. The burnings turned out to be the work of drunk boys playing arsonist and insurance-scam artists. Still, the probe consumed Patrick and his investigators. "You know how hard it is to solve arsons? Sifting through ash?" Patrick says.

Isn't that special, putting opposition to racial quotas (or that "action" buzz phrase) and black church burnings side by side? Again, it should be noted that curbing quotas was never a priority for Speaker Newt Gingrich.

4. There was lots of crying men in it. First, "nonpartisan activist" Ron Bell has "tears in his eyes" at how Patrick inspired him to volunteer for him. Then Patrick is recalling how an immigrant said he would cast his first vote for him:

And suddenly he's crying. Maybe it's exhaustion.

Maybe it's the memory of Emily Patrick. His mother trying to push him out into the world and still make him feel safe and secure if things fell apart: You can always come back home .

He wipes at the tears. There's a heave of the chest.

"People are hungry for hope," he says, slowly, nearly whispering. "They want a reason to believe."

5. Ted Kennedy speaking from a podium is like an opera man's aria as he stumps for Patrick's election. To conservatives, who have often heard a soundbite of Teddy singing "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" off key on radio shows like Laura Ingraham's, this is an especially odd passage. 

Kennedy, white-haired, in a blue suit, gives dozens of speeches every year. Originality is not the goal; passion is. And he's howling.

"Are we gonna go out and do it?"

A thick pink finger is jabbing the air. The bifocals are slipping. His voice is rising as if singing an aria.

6. The please-vote-Democrat-to-make-history ending. The story concluded with another reference to the front page, where Haygood mentioned the Massachetts 54 Regiment, the "first all-black regiment recurited in the North to fight for the Union Army in the Civil War," memorialized in a bronze statue with a poem by Robert Lowell about the heroes being heard to breathe in bronze. Patrick spoke:

"You know," he says, "it was the great Dr. Benjamin Mays who said, 'Not failure, but low aim is sin.' Isn't that powerful?"

The high aim of the governor's chair.

On Beacon Hill, where the poet could nearly hear the battling bronze Negroes breathe.