Summary: last night’s Cathedral City candidates’ forum provided two interesting spectacles. First, candidate Theresa Hooks, the designated heiress of outgoing lame-duck Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, managed to disqualify herself by one simple response to a question posed to her. Second, the media moderator and media panelists, who clearly had not done their due diligence, managed to lead every single candidate into a violation of the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s 65-year-old open meeting law. While many low information residents and voters may not have noticed, a number of us who were in the audience were clearly aware of what happened.
Candidate fora tend to be much of a muchness, often stupefyingly boring repetitions of platitudes, pablum, and canned talking points. Few, if any, truly undecided voters actually have their minds made up by what they see or hear at a candidate forum. To that extent, candidate fora are largely exercises in marketing the message to the base and providing useful soundbites that can be quoted in the local media. It’s rare under such circumstances that a candidate disqualifies herself by giving an answer that turns out to be a complete dealbreaker, but sometimes it happens. It happened last night with Theresa Hooks.
As rare as it is for a candidate to disqualify herself with one single response, it’s also rare for a moderator and the media panel to manage to lead the candidates into a fairly serious violation of California’s open meeting law, but both such events occurred at last night’s Cathedral City candidates’ forum.
Candidate Theresa Hooks managed to disqualify herself by her dealbreaker response to a question to all the candidates whether a candidate’s or councilmember’s private financial affairs were a legitimate subject of public scrutiny and comment. Candidates Fausto Ascencio, Mark Carnevale, Sergio Espericueta, Shelley Kaplan, and Gordon McGinnis all said “no.” Hooks said “yes.”
Hooks’s response was exactly the sort of response one should expect from a mentor and essential political clone of outgoing lame-duck Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa. DeRosa has a reputation for prying into the private financial affairs of her political rivals and then spoon feeding that information to credulous reporters at the Desert Sun with a generous dose of spin intended to harm whichever political rival has been targeted.
In the spring of 2013, DeRosa spoonfed sometime Desert Sun reporter Tamara Sone a whole series of private financial tidbits about councilmember Greg Pettis. With DeRosa’s assistance, Sone (who had some significant financial skeletons in her own closet, skeletons which later led to the reporter’s swift and unceremonious departure from the employ of the Desert Sun.) produced a breathless hatchet piece essentially accusing the long-serving councilmember of all manner of financial improprieties.
Yet, no evidence has ever emerged to corroborate many of the more outlandish inferences and assumptions contained in that article. Moreover, by failing to follow the traditional two-source rule, and by failing to vet some of the more obvious lies told to her by DeRosa and by former Councilman Charles “Bud” England, Sone managed to produce an article that was tainted by, to use the Supreme Court’s language from its New York Times v. Sullivan opinion, “actual malice” and “reckless disregard for the truth.”
By suggesting that a candidate’s or councilmember’s private financials are a legitimate subject of public scrutiny, Hooks also implies that a candidate’s or councilmember’s financials should also be available to such a person’s political rivals. Clearly, Hooks is playing from Kathleen DeRosa’s playbook, looking for an opportunity to try to dig up some dirt on potential council rivals and use it against them.
As noted before, Hooks’s position is disqualifying. It is disqualifying because it is exactly the position taken by one of the most unethical and divisive mayors in Cathedral City’s history, Kathleen Joan DeRosa. DeRosa has a long history of trying to dig in to the private lives of those who she considers enemies, and to spoon feed whatever unflattering information she can find to overly credulous and inexperienced reporters for our local Gannett newspaper, which has always been unseemly eager to carry her water.
We cannot afford to have a councilmember following in Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s unethical footsteps.
We cannot afford to have a councilmember who believes that it’s okay to use private information to try to blackmail her political rivals or embarrass them with a view to diminishing their effectiveness in local or regional public service.
We cannot afford to have a councilmember who will predictably hold others to much higher standards than she holds herself.
Moreover, Hooks’s willingness to play a rather cynical gender card, proclaiming that inasmuch as she is the only woman in the race, voters should select her XX chromosome rather than selecting a more qualified holder of XY chromosomes, is clearly designed to appeal to two kinds of voters. First, it is intended to seal the deal with the right wing Christian base which she has inherited from DeRosa. Second, it is clearly intended to play to the white liberal guilt of otherwise progressive voters who may not be well informed about Theresa Hooks’s unfortunate record of bigotry and homophobia.
Indeed, Ms. Hooks’s position with respect to Cathedral City’s substantial queer community is rather clear. She does not much care for us, and would doubtless prefer to see us vanish. Indeed, in a breathless letter to the editor of the Desert Sun dated September 23, 2006, Hooks came eagerly to the defense of Focus on the Family, an anti-gay hate group, quoting the Genesis “male and female” creation narrative to justify discrimination against LGBT people.
Someone who is willing to be guided by Kathleen DeRosa’s political playbook to the extent of being willing to use financial information to harm her political rivals, and who is as obviously unfriendly to queerfolk as Theresa Hooks, is simply not the right choice for our city Council.
But if Theresa Hooks is the wrong choice for our Council and showed it last night, we may also fault the moderator and media panel at last night’s debate for creating a serious and obvious Brown Act violation.
California’s open meeting law, the Ralph M. Brown Act of 1949, forbids members of an elected body from reaching prior or advance consensus as to action outside of the context of duly noticed public meetings. A quorum or majority of a council or of a governing board may not get together, either directly, through intermediaries, or through communications such as telephone calls or emails, to arrive at what amounts to a pre-consensus before a formal public meeting is held and a decision is taken in the open where the public can see it and hold its representatives accountable. The Brown Act also applies to candidates. Liability under the Act attaches to both declared and qualified candidates.
Thus, last night, when one of the panel asked the candidates how each candidate intended to proceed when filling the Council seat Stan Henry will vacate when he becomes mayor, and each candidate expressed his or her intention, a potential quorum of the new council effectively had a meeting to decide a course of action well outside of what the Brown Act defines as permissible. Each candidate, by participating, violated the Act, and the media panelists and moderator Brooke Beare (from the local CBS affiliate,) made themselves accessories the violation. Now, it may be the candidates were legitimately unaware of the provisions of the Act, not having been educated as to its provisions and requirements.
I do not know whether, on the unbelievably lackluster watch of the current mayor, Cathedral City has abandoned its former practice of providing some basic orientation to Council candidates about the responsibilities under California’s political ethics laws, but I do remember that during my own victorious council campaign in 2002, I received just such an orientation. Had I been a candidate at a forum at which such a question was asked, I would have respectfully declined to answer on the grounds that the Brown Act was being violated.
Of course, when I brought the issue up to the panelists and the moderator after the forum, I was pooh-poohed. Nobody likes to have their egregious errors pointed out to them, even by somebody who does so politely. Perhaps my next step may well be to bring this matter to the attention of the District Attorney. After all, the Brown Act has been with us since 1949, and after 65 years, there is simply no good reason why debate moderators or panelists should not be aware of the rather stringent requirements of the Act and conform their conduct to it.
The rule of law suffers when it is ignored, as it has been too often in Cathedral City of late. I don’t think Theresa Hooks has the first idea of what the rule of law is, or she would not be so eager to go digging into the private lives of her political rivals, trying to find the same kind of dirt on them that her political mentor, Kathleen Joan DeRosa, has been trying to find on the numerous people in Cathedral City she considers enemies.
I know whom I will support in this election, I also know whom I will not, and Theresa Hooks is at the top of my “do not support” list.
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