BSO: All in the Family

I was taken aback a bit recently when reading that newsy ad-rag The Reminder and came upon the following paragraph in an article about congressional candidate Nadia Milleron (above).

Mileron questioned Neal's use of his son's public relations firm, Brendon Neal Strategies, at a cost of $4,630 per month. While she acknowledged it was not illegal, she said Neal could be spending his campaign funds in a way that benefits his constituents.

Neal pays his son $50,000 a year to come up with "strategies?" To do what? Figure out how to beat penniless fringe candidates like Nadia Milleron? In any case, people give Neal campaign money voluntarily, so he's free to spend it how he likes without regard to whether it is being spent in ways that "benefits his constituents." Campaign money by its very nature generally goes exclusively to help the candidate get elected.

What I found interesting though is that I had never heard anything about this relationship between Neal and his strategizing son before. Surely this was a detail from the article that deserved further scrutiny. However, I had no hope that any additional information would be forthcoming.

It turns out that I was very much wrong about that, as a whole lot of additional details suddenly exploded on the site of the digital political magazine Politico. If you want, you can read all the shady details right here. Typically, it took our timid local media three days after the bombshell release of the Politico expose to finally acknowledge its revelations.

The sad truth is that this kind of all in the family feather nesting is a long ingrained feature of our Valley political culture. A drunken brother-in-law needs a job with strong union protection? A lazy daughter wants a nice payday to relax as a City Hall bureaucrat? A son desires a position for which he has no known qualifications? With the right connections, anything is possible. There is never a shortage of such types to be found in Pioneer Valley politics, especially in Springfield. Even the sainted former Mayor Charlie Ryan was accused of using campaign funds to give his daughter a well paid do-nothing job in one of his campaigns, as referred to in The Diary of J. Wesley Miller:

(Legendary activist Eamon O'Sullivan) insists he won't run Charlie Ryan's office for him this year like he did in 1995 unless he gets paid. He said he was shocked when he looked at the campaign finance reports for Ryan's 95 campaign and saw that Ryan's daughter was getting $900 a week working for her dad. Joe Napolitan ran up nearly $50,000 in consulting fees and Darby O'Brien also got paid fifty grand to do public relations work. These people were almost never seen during the campaign, yet Eamon, who was in the office every day, was never offered a dime.

But if the nature of Neal's fiscal relationship with his son is no surprise to anyone who knows how things work in local politics, the fact that these issues arose at all is almost the most interesting aspect of the whole scandal. Who had the juice to push these allegations onto the pages of a national digital magazine? Neal's challenger Milleron certainly had the motive, but no way did she have the juice.

Milleron is essentially a one issue candidate who has been crusading for air traffic safety reform ever since her daughter was tragically killed in a plane crash. In the past she has pursued Neal so doggedly on the issue that she told the Hampshire Gazette that when Neal "saw me in the halls of the legislature, he screamed at me and told me he needed a restraining order against me." However, on any other issue she doesn't really have a platform beyond some vague left-leaning platitudes. Perhaps most significantly, Milleron has no money with which to challenge Neal's multi-million dollar campaign chest.

What I really would like to know is who alerted Milleron to Neal's financial relationship with his son? It happened before the Politico article came out, as I first saw the scandal hinted at in The Reminder more than a week before the Politico piece was released. So who took that story from a tiny tidbit in a little local paper into the national spotlight? Here's my guess:

There are young and ambitious people in Valley politics who have been chomping at the bit for years to run for Congress, only to be frustrated by Neal's overpowering incumbency. Neal's 2022 challenger, Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, fell into that category before Neal slammed him into political oblivion with a landslide defeat caused in part by a sex scandal critics accused Neal himself of orchestrating.

There are at least a dozen credible political figures in the Valley who would be extremely interested in that seat if it ever became open. It could well be that one or more of them are tired of waiting patiently on the sidelines for Neal to decide to retire (something he shows no inclination to do) so maybe they attempted to give Neal a little push towards the door with the help of some media allies.

But has the scandal had any meaningful political effect? I doubt it. Milleron will probably get a higher percentage on Election Day than she would have gotten before the scandal, but I predict it will be no where near enough to take Neal out. More ominous for Neal is the rampant rumors that congressional Republicans will call for an official House Ethics Probe into the allegations, which would blow up the scandal to a whole higher level. Thus far no congress-critter has actually done so, but even if they do, nothing would happen until safely after the election is over.

Flashback to 2017 - Here's an old pic I came across, Richie Neal is in the corner under the word HORNS.