High Crimes and Misdemeanors on the Republican Campaign Trail

November 2008 is a long way off, and there's been widespread concern that the presidential campaign season has already drawn on so long that it will exhaust public attention. Fortunately, the McCain, Giuliani and Romney campaigns have generously sustained our interest this summer with one corrupt campaign official after another stepping down after doing more than the law will allow. Here's a rundown on the GOP campaign scoundrels of 2008.

1. McCain campaign's outhouse outreach efforts in Florida

On July 11, Sen. John McCain's Florida campaign co-chair Bob Allen, a state assemblyman with an unrelentingly anti-gay record, knocked on a park bathroom stall in Titusville, Fla., and offered the man within a $20 bill to give him a blow job. The man was an undercover officer.

At first it seemed to be a familiar kind of tale -- the secret passions of a conservative who had taken a strong moral stand against gay adoption, and even presented to his state's Committee on Homeland Security & Public Safety a bill that would have tightened the loopholes against public masturbators.

Recently, however, the story has taken on new dimensions with various accounts from Allen. To see the big picture, he explains, you must take into account that there was a lightning storm (from which he took refuge in the bathroom, he says), the park's "stocky" black people (i.e., their presence scared Allen into paying), and his panic that he might "become a statistic" if he didn't act fast.

Fearful of being mugged, the awfully jumpy Bob Allen told the police that he cut the blow job deal so that he could reach a guarded security area, the nearest of which was several miles away from him -- a plan which resists easy understanding. Maybe Allen hoped the oral sex could somehow stun his adversary?

Rather than quit his duties as assemblyman, Allen has apologized to the local NAACP for his "stocky" comment, explaining that in the course of being "accused of being a bathroom cruising pervert, and then a racist," he has come to understand the black (not gay) civil rights struggle better.

He plans to run for the state senate in 2010.

2. Romney's Secret Service wannabe

In 2004, law enforcement officers, having towed an illegally parked car, were surprised to find within it, according to the Boston Herald, "a set of red-and-blue flashing lights hidden in the grill [...] a siren and public address system, multiple police radios, strobe lights on the wheels, a police baton and a metal plate with a photo of a state police patch that said "official business."

The car belonged to Gov. Mitt Romney's "director of operations," Jay Garrity, who quit the candidate's presidential campaign in July after it emerged that he was now in trouble in two states for pretending to be a cop during the course of his duties in Romney's "logistics" department. He had handed out fake State of Massachusetts badges for use by colleagues and was said to have used his cop status to blaze through turnpikes without paying.

"I have resigned from the Mitt Romney for President campaign so that the media attention on me will not become a distraction to the campaign's efforts," he said.

Just two days after Garrity's resignation, the Herald reported that Romney's event planner, Will Ritter, had uploaded a MySpace page painting himself as a "Jason Bourne-esque" figure in the description of the newspaper whose duties include "very secretive work" in "special ops."

3. Romney's fraudmeister

More Romney. One of 35 co-chairs of candidate Mitt Romney's national war chest, a businessman named Alan Fabian, was in trouble this August for an alleged $32 million swindle -- one of the largest cases of its kind ever prosecuted in his home state of Maryland.

The way it supposedly worked was this: As head of his Virginia-based consulting company, Maximus, Inc., he'd first put in fake orders for computers. Instead of getting a Dell, the outfit was secretly paying for Fabian's beach houses and private jet travel. So he's facing 23 charges, including money laundering, mail and bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice.