DeWeese battles to keep finding the right words
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"In retrospect,'' Bill DeWeese told me over dinner last June, "I should have been more administratively punctilious.''
That's the way Mr. DeWeese always has spoken in his 35 years representing Pennsylvania's southwest corner in the state House. The Greene County Democrat's greatest joy after politics is wordplay, and he'll sometimes edit himself in mid-sentence, rolling a flashier word into the phrase that just left his lips as if it were still floating above the table, reshaping it as a potter would his clay.
Mr. DeWeese spent Thursday and Friday waiting to see if insufficiently "punctilious" (concerned with details or codes of conventions) rhymes with "felonious." A Dauphin County jury was deliberating on whether his staff doing campaign work while on the state clock meant he was guilty of theft, conspiracy and other words that aren't much fun to play with.
Mr. DeWeese, 61, had invited me to dinner at the Grand Concourse because I'd been pounding him in print for years. He agreed to go dutch, and we sat at his favorite corner table, with plenty of light. He did most of the talking, I did the scribbling, and then he drove right back to Harrisburg.
PG STORE
That night he referred to "the prosecutorial potentate of the moment.'' That would be then attorney general, now governor and still nemesis Tom Corbett. Though Mr. DeWeese says he cooperated fully in the state's investigation, he saw himself as the victim of "the unalloyed prosecutorial enthusiasms of a maniacal witch hunt.''
As such hunts go, this one moved at the speed of snails rather than bloodhounds. State investigators searched the Democratic Office of Legislative Research in August 2007, news that was soon "cascading in the journals and gazettes of this broad-bosomed commonwealth,'' Mr. DeWeese recalled.
That November, House Majority Leader DeWeese cleaned house, axing his long-time chief of staff Mike Manzo and six others. I wrote then that Mr. DeWeese had roughly the survival odds of General Custer, but he likened himself to another wartime leader: "Churchill in '39.''
Almost all of those fired staffers were indicted the following summer, and it was clear then if Mr. DeWeese hadn't figured it out before that "I'd created the worst enemies I could ever create.'' Mr. Manzo signed a plea agreement in 2008 conceding his guilt. Still awaiting sentencing, Mr. Manzo testified in Mr. DeWeese's trial that among staffers there "was an expectation that [political work] was part of their job.''
First Published February 5, 2012 12:00 am
