Aug 18, 2008
The Year's Worst House Candidate
Every election season, it seems as if there's one candidate who rises above the pack. This year, it's no contest: Oregon Republican Mike Erickson, a wealthy businessman running for a potentially close open seat in the Portland suburbs.
Erickson won the GOP primary despite at attack from his opponent, subsequently confirmed by the Oregonian, that he had paid for an ex-girlfriend's abortion. (Erickson's less-than-credible story was that he gave the woman the money and drove her to an abortion clinic, but had no idea what she wanted the money for or what she planned to do at the clinic.)
Now, the Oregonian has revealed another item that is--to put it mildly--embarrassing for a conservative Republican. It turns out Erickson traveled to Cuba in 2004, ostensibly for a humanitarian mission, but really for a high-end vacation. To satisfy U.S. immigration requirements, Erickson claimed to make a large donation to a medical clinic that doesn't exist. When the paper confronted him with the discrepancy, he revised his story to assert that he made the donation to another medical clinic, whose name he couldn't recall, and he couldn't remember any of the people with whom he dealt at the clinic, and that he had no records of the donation.
The kicker: the vacation was advertised as"Comandante Fidel Castro's Annual Gala Cigar Dinner and Auction."
Erickson won the GOP primary despite at attack from his opponent, subsequently confirmed by the Oregonian, that he had paid for an ex-girlfriend's abortion. (Erickson's less-than-credible story was that he gave the woman the money and drove her to an abortion clinic, but had no idea what she wanted the money for or what she planned to do at the clinic.)
Now, the Oregonian has revealed another item that is--to put it mildly--embarrassing for a conservative Republican. It turns out Erickson traveled to Cuba in 2004, ostensibly for a humanitarian mission, but really for a high-end vacation. To satisfy U.S. immigration requirements, Erickson claimed to make a large donation to a medical clinic that doesn't exist. When the paper confronted him with the discrepancy, he revised his story to assert that he made the donation to another medical clinic, whose name he couldn't recall, and he couldn't remember any of the people with whom he dealt at the clinic, and that he had no records of the donation.
The kicker: the vacation was advertised as"Comandante Fidel Castro's Annual Gala Cigar Dinner and Auction."