Lena Guerrero and Karl Rove

Lena Guerrero died this week. Here is the best article I've been able to find about her, from the Brownsville Herald. Like many longtime politicians, she worked hard for many years but is probably best known for one dramatic scandal attached to her name.
In 1992, she was running for re-election to the Texas Railroad Commission. In a practice common in statewide Texas offices for many years, she had gained the seat by appointment after the previous commissioner had resigned to make way for a replacement. And the Texas Railroad Commission is, in fact, one of the most powerful institutions in the state government--due to a quirk, it is the state agency that regulates the production of oil and gas, for many years the biggest part of the Texas economy and still very important. So for a Hispanic woman to be one of its leaders was a big deal. She may have been the best example of Governor Ann Richards' drive to make state government less of a good-old-boy network.
So in 1992 Guerrero is running for re-election. In May a political campaign expert working for a Republican opponent has been working to dig up dirt on her, and he strikes gold. Guerrero had been a student at the University of Texas at Austin and claimed to have graduated Phi Beta Kappa. It turns out that not only did she not make PBK, she did not in fact graduate, being so dedicated to the birth of her political career (she had been the youngest-ever president of the student Democratic group) that she blew off her last semester.
Here's where it gets interesting. The Republican campaign operative takes the information and puts it in a file and lets it sit. Four months later, when it is timed to do the most damage, he releases the information to the press. The results are predictably spectacular. The info is all over the news, Guerrero resigns her seat, but it is too late by law to put another Democratic candidate up for the post. She runs anyway and loses.
Obviously the timing of the release of the information had been calculated by a person both smart and ruthless. As the title of this post has already told you, that person was Karl Rove, not yet a White House aide. As is often said, politics is a dirty business. But whenever I read an article suggesting that Rove is basically a decent person with high ethical standards, I remember this story, when he gained information about an opponent's wrongdoing and, instead of immediately announcing that wrongdoing to the world, exposing it to the light as quickly as possible as someone with high ethical standards would feel compelled to do, he sat on it until it could serve as the most effective weapon possible in a political campaign. Karl Rove loves dirt, and any concept of fairness is alien to his nature. RIP Lena Guerrero, who acknowledged and paid for what she did. Karl Rove is still alive.