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It's taken me most of the day to comprehend fully the new Guinta brouhaha. It took me that long because I find it hard to believe a campaign can stumble that badly, repeatedly.
Let me see if I can get this right:
* Mayor Guinta is present at bar during brawl. Man in bar gets leg broken in seven places. Mayor fails to talk to the authorities until days later. Bad national press.
* Candidate Guinta, paraded as a top tier pickup by the NRCC, can't break six digits in his first fundraising quarter, and has to front his own campaign 20K just to get over that hurdle. The UL does its best to spin it as a great quarter, but the national political press notices the lackluster progress.
* Frank Guinta fails to pay his tax bill... again. (This is not the first time this has happened!)
* Team Guinta responds, in part:
The Mayor paid his bill before the Democrats even thought of making this false charge, so perhaps they should check their facts
* Kathy asks for some clarification about what exactly is the false charge, and we get a more revealing story:
The bill was paid in full yesterday, prior to today's attacks and prior to us having or knowledge they were imminent. It amounted to nothing more than a simple oversight that was corrected. I am sure most families can relate to this type of occurrence.
Now earlier in the day, I asked the NHDP if they had screenshots of the deliquent tax bills. They did, and they sent them along to me with the additional information that that's how they looked "this morning." The screenshots are below the fold, with tax id and address redacted (even though the Manchester tax records are a matter of public record, and Google-able).
The screenshots are to underscore the delinquency date, April 23, 2009. If it became delinquent at that time, how long in total was the bill overdue before then?
Here's the thing: Team Guinta claims this is a "simple oversight" that "most families can relate to." It's true! There are times when, even with the best intentions, bills don't get paid for one reason or another, including, yes, simple oversights.
However, I don't know any families that leave tax bills to go delinquent for several months while at the same time loaning 20,000 dollars to one's own campaign.
If those are the kind of spending priorities we can expect from a Congressman Guinta (added to the kind of accountability we can expect from him through the lens of the bar brawl incident), New Hampshire's choice in 2010 ought to be crystal clear for Carol Shea-Porter, perhaps the most genuine, modest, and pennywise person I've ever had the good fortune to meet.
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