Charleston, WV – Today, Dan Greear was featured in The Wall Street Journal by Kimberley A. Strassel:
“Take one part ego, one part ambition and one part lawyer, mix it with an office that has few restraints on power, and you’ll end up with the worst sort of state attorney general. Take Dan Greear, and you’ll have a man at the front of a nascent electoral movement to change the formula.
Mr. Greear is the 40-year-old Republican lawyer working to unseat West Virginia’s entrenched top
prosecutor, Darrell McGraw. His quest has become a case study in the opportunities, and pitfalls, of an upstart reformer challenging an incumbent attorney general who, like New York’s Eliot Spitzer, has cemented his position through populism and political patronage.
It’s also an insight into a new wave of reformist candidates across the country. As state attorneys general have become more brazen with their power, and as outside groups have started shining a light on their backroom practices, voters have become uneasy. It’s this sense of disquiet that candidates like Mr. Greear are tapping into as they promise to refocus lawsuits, rein in the tort bar and restore a sense of justice to prosecutorial office.
In Indiana, Greg Zoeller, the chief deputy for the current attorney general, is running for the top slot and touting the fact his office has never been close to trial lawyers. His opponent, Democrat Linda Pence, is a trial attorney. In Missouri, GOP state Sen. Michael Gibbons is fighting for an open seat and promising transparency in office. In North Carolina, in a strange twist, a pro-business Democrat is defending his seat against a trial-lawyer Republican. Ethics is also figuring in attorney general races in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
To Mr. Greear’s advantage, his opponent is a case study of abuse in office. Mr. McGraw, in more than 14 years as West Virginia’s attorney general, has been a pioneer in the practice of filing questionable lawsuits against big companies, secretly doling out the legal work to outside trial lawyer friends who reap millions in fees. Those lawyers then turn around and donate heavily to Mr. McGraw’s re-election.
Polls show the public, in theory, disapproves. In a Tarrance Group survey last year, 75% of West Virginians think an attorney general should publicly disclose outside contracts with lawyers. Nearly 60% think attorneys should have to competitively bid for those jobs.
It’s this that motivates Mr. Greear. ‘I’ve watched what’s going on and thought: If I were doing this to a client, I’d lose my law license. I don’t think any fair-thinking person can think this is good government, or good solid legal representation for West Virginia,’ he tells me.
Also helping is that Mr. McGraw’s own sense of political immortality has recently landed him, and his state, in hot water. In 2001, he appointed four private law firms to sue drug companies for alleged deceptive advertising of OxyContin. Having forced a settlement in 2004, he handed his tort allies $3.3 million of the $10 million haul. Mr. McGraw had sued on behalf of state agencies (including the state’s Medicaid program) — yet his office kept the rest of the settlement money.
The federal government, which pays a significant portion of the state’s Medicaid bills, remains furious the program received none of the settlement, and is now threatening to withhold millions in Medicaid money. Mr. Greear is hitting hard on the uproar, using it to suggest Mr. McGraw has lost sight of why he’s suing companies, other than for the headlines.
That’s the upside. On the downside, Mr. McGraw remains relatively popular in the state, in part because one of his greatest innovations has been the art (as with the OxyContin suit) of turning settlement proceeds into political patronage. When the West Virginia attorney general crafts a settlement, he makes sure it goes to his own office, where he doles it out with great fanfare to universities, health-care centers and county commissions. In January, he grandly announced that a $12 million settlement he’d negotiated with Visa and Master Card would be going to fund statewide sales-tax holidays.
His other main asset is fear. Mr. Greear admits a big hurdle is fund raising, even among a business
community that is desperate to throw out Mr. McGraw. ‘I go to so many people and hear the same thing: I sure hope you beat him, but I can’t afford to have my name on your records. He might come after me next.’
This is a frightening example of how the power of an attorney general can corrupt even the electoral
process.
For now, Mr. Greear’s strategy has been to gin up grassroots support, hoping to reach a ‘tipping point’ at which more people in the corporate community will believe he can win. Up and down the state, he hits on the ethical points, and he recently signed a model ‘Attorney General Transparency Code’ that is being circulated by the American Tort Reform Association.
Mr. McGraw is still tipped to win, but the difference this time is that he’s being asked to justify his methods.
That’s a change, and it’s overdue.”
To read the article in entirety, go to http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121754833081202775.html.