Greg Zoeller Should Be Terrified of Linda Pence

I met Linda Pence two days ago. She is amazingly personable and incredibly sharp, and when I heard her pitch her candidacy, I became an instant believer. Ms. Pence's resume speaks for itself, and her tenacity is well-documented, even among conservative bloggers who try desperately to turn it into a negative to help their friends.

Let's be blunt. Most people who aren't lawyers hate lawyers until you need one, and then you want somebody who will crawl up and die on criminals, scam artists, and corporate wrongdoers of all stripes. Pence will be our pit bull.

Pence's proposal for independent investigation of deaths of children under the care of the Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS) is critical, and one Governor Daniels fears greatly. (In fact, you should expect to see the Governor dump any cash he can spare into Greg Zoeller's race to protect himself from true oversight of all of his activities). And this is just the tip of the iceberg on her agenda.

Apparently, the conservatorati, too, know Pence can flip this office to the Democrat column, which is why they're pushing the most ludicrous charges and guilt-by-assocation innuendo to undermine Pence's candidacy.

Recently, Advance Indiana attempted to brand Linda Pence a hypocrite because she criticized Attorney General Steve Carter for hiring a Chicago law firm for a DISCOUNTED rate of $395 per hour, when, lo and behold, she just hired a media consultant from Chicago. Let me dissect this so you'll see how assinine this criticism is.

When Steve Carter hired the Chicago firm, he used TAXPAYER dollars, not campaign dollars. Steve Carter was essentially saying, "Neither I nor Greg Zoeller know how to work a major case, so we have to pay an insane hourly rate to someone who can."

Seeing the obvious implication, AI and other R blogs, such as Hoosier Access, have tried a second tact. From Hoosier Access:

"As Gary Welsh noted over at Advance Indiana, it’s pathetic and hypocritical of Linda Pence to criticize Steve Carter and Greg Zoeller for seeking outside counsel when she personally was very handsomely paid for being an outside counsel during the O’Bannon administration."

These bloggers are referring to Ms. Pence's work on the 1999 White River fish kill case. Ms. Pence served as outside counsel at the behest of the late, great Governor Frank O'Bannon. Ms. Pence recovered $14 million for the state, making her acquisition an extremely profitable one.

If there is any criticism to be had with that work, wouldn't it be directed toward the O'Bannon administration for not having someone on staff or at IDEM to handle this litigation? After all, I don't fault the Chicago firm for representing a client in need, Steve Carter. I fault Steve Carter for being a client in need.

Put simply, Hoosiers can pay expert attorneys hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, OR we can get own expert attorney in-house, in the form of Linda Pence, for the price of votes plus $79,400 per year.

The appeal of that simple statement is undeniable, which is why the Republican bloggers are using the new number one dirty word in their operative handbooks: "Chicago."

Anything that can connect a Democrat to anything in Chicago (or Lake County, for that matter), no matter how tangentially, soils them. I envision the day when an East Chicago pastor who takes daily polygraphs to prove he's corrupt-free runs for a statewide office, and the R's will point out that "Pastor So-and-So had lunch regularly with Bob Pastrick." And I'll say, "Yeah, and so did half of East Chicago."

At some point, don't we have to say please show me ANY evidence of wrong-doing (even if its uncharged) by the ACTUAL CANDIDATE instead of playing Six Degrees of Separation through discredited politicians?

But the most telling insight into this race comes from the fact that almost EVERY Republican blogger post has been anti-Pence, not pro-Zoeller.

That's because when you have nothing to showcase, all you can do is distract and attack.

Greg Zoeller Should Be Terrified of Linda Pence