Brian Howey: The Kelty Meltdown and Sold Out Souls

FORT WAYNE, IN - For those of us who know Republican mayoral nominee Matt Kelty, Wednesday was a sad day. There he was ... in a jail mugshot. There were images of Kelty being led away in handcuffs.

For anyone who knows Matt Kelty, these are the last things we ever expected to see. He was a former district director for Sens. Dick Lugar and Dan Coats, two of the squeakiest clean political figures in Indiana.

Kelty knows politics. He worked on Lugar’s 1994 re-election campaign and was a grassroots organizer during Lugar’s presidential campaign in Iowa a year later. In 2002, Kelty came within 63 votes of upsetting State Rep. Winfield Moses Jr., knocking on 10,000 doors during a 16-week time span. Coats had appointed him to the Congressional Student Program. He was a precinct worker. As his website says, “Matt has been in politics at all levels.”

Which leads us to 2007 and what has become an unmitigated disaster for Kelty, Fort Wayne Republicans and the family advocacy groups so involved in his campaign.

The Right to Life movement has been involved with Kelty’s mayoral campaign from its earliest moments. Sources tell me there is a concerted effort by Right to Life and other family organizations to recruit and run candidates of that stripe for city and county offices. These subsequent officeholders will then be poised to move into legislative, congressional and, yes, perhaps even the governor’s office after the Daniels era passes. These groups bristled at Gov. Daniels when he suggested just prior to his re-election kickoff that he had little stomach for some of the wedge issues such as the anti-gay marriage amendment (Indiana already has such a law on its books).

If there was ever a poster boy for this ingenious strategy, it was Matt Kelty. Eyebrows were lifting when Right to Life and the Indiana Family Institute became so involved in the Kelty campaign, given the fact that abortion is not a municipal issue. Pornography, massage parlors and violent video games are local issues and, thus, relevant. This turned off some of the “economic” Republicans who defected to Mayor Graham Richard over the past two elections.

But it was the pro-life wing that propelled Kelty to a stunning upset victory last May by a narrow margin when just about every establishment Republican from Senate President Pro Temp David Long, to city councilmen, to U.S. Rep, Mark Souder backed Allen County Commissioner Nelson Peters. Kelty’s grassroots organization was energized and effective. And, well, they cheated.

This is where Kelty overreached with catastrophic results. Allen County Right to Life President Fred Rost “personally” loaned him $140,000. A Zogby poll came out of nowhere in the final weeks of the primary campaign and shattered the illusion of Peters’ inevitable ascendancy. No one could tell where the poll came from or who paid for it ... until after the primary election, when Kelty filed a campaign addendum acknowledging the “personal” loans were used for campaign purposes. It mocked campaign finance laws that intended to offer transparency so that money (and polls) don’t flit into the public domain out of nowhere in the final days.

Super lawyer Jim Bopp was summoned to the defense. The GOP majority on the Election Board sided with Kelty. In Bopp’s wake, Curt Smith of the Indiana Family Institute said, “that takes care of that.” Less than 24 hours before the complaint hit Republican Prosecutor Karen Richard’s desk, Kelty was quoted as saying, “Case closed. Period.” In a twist of irony, Richards reached out to Dan Sigler, the attorney who prosecuted Mayor Win Moses in 1985. According to GOP Chairmen Steve Shine and Jim Banks of Whitley County, Sigler, they said, had an impeccable reputation for fairness.

The most damning element of the nine count indictment handed down by Sigler’s grand jury were two counts of felony perjury stemming from the Zogby poll that changed the environment. Kelty, it is alleged, lied to a grand jury. And then last Wednesday: mugshots, perp walks, handcuffs, the exit through a courthouse side door. A courthouse lawn rally took place several hours later when a defiant Kelty insisted he had done “nothing wrong” and declared that “in the meantime we wage a vigorous campaign. We will win the election in November. In the end, we will prevail.”

That is wishful thinking. The Fort Wayne Republican Party is a house divided. Several GOP executive committee members testified before the grand jury, proof the party is probably beyond repair going into an election sequence where they had a real shot at winning in Indiana’s second largest city.

A Lugar or Coats campaign would never have pulled the kind of fast ones that Kelty has allegedly perpetrated in this race. It is a stunning fall for a rising star. He was positioned to become the political poster child for family values and strong moral character while playing by the rules.

Those in the family advocacy circles who protest what they call a vendetta may find themselves walking the fine line between having the credibility of true believers and wanting something so badly they will sell their own political souls.

Howey is publisher of The Howey Political Report at www.howeypolitics.com