Race loyalty is bad politics in Jefferson case

Clarence Page:

SOME members of the Congressional Black Caucus have raised the bloody shirt of racism in defense of their embattled colleague Rep. William Jefferson. I appreciate their sense of loyalty to a friend, but Jefferson hasn't given them much to work with.

Jefferson's friends say he deserves the presumption of innocence. Indeed, under our constitutional system of justice, as I once heard an embattled Chicago politician quoted, "Every man is innocent until his case has been through appeal." But, the Court of Public Opinion in which all politics operate is quite another matter.

There is, for example, the embarrassing little question of the $90,000 in alleged bribery money that the FBI found in the Louisiana Democrat's freezer.

Jefferson denies wrongdoing, but his outlook does not look sunny. Two other men already have been convicted in the bribery probe. One is a former Jefferson aide. The other is a businessman who pleaded guilty on May 3 to paying more than $400,000 in bribes to Jefferson.

Worse, the FBI is reported to have caught Jefferson accepting a leather briefcase with $100,000 in alleged bribe money from an undercover informant in front of a Northern Virginia hotel. During a search of his Washington home, the FBI says it found $90,000 worth of the marked bills in Jefferson's freezer. No word yet on what happened to the other $10,000.

While corruption probes are nothing new in politics, this one leaves Jefferson's fellow Democrats in what Washington insiders sometimes call "an awkward." It is hard for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders to continue pummeling the Republican "culture of corruption" while Mr. Freezer Bucks remains perched on his prestigious Ways and Means Committee seat.

But, as Democratic leaders took the initial steps toward stripping Jefferson of his committee post last week, his fellow Congressional Black Caucus members issued a statement defending the right of the Louisiana sharecropper's son to be presumed innocent, at least until he is indicted.

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Well, he has already destroyed their culture of corruption meme. If the Congessional Black Caucus wants to keep him in the spotlight twisting in the wind, they are certainly doing the republicans a big favor.