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St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)

November 21, 2007 Wednesday

THIRD EDITION

Turkey freed, Martin axed

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. B8

LENGTH: 531 words

It's difficult to believe that Ed Martin's tenure as Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt's chief of staff didn't even last 15 months. The
37-year-old St. Louis lawyer packed a lot of controversy into a very short time.

Mr. Martin was at the helm when the governor's office botched the private settlement over Agriculture Director Fred Ferrell's
demeaning "show dog" comments about a female staff member. Mr. Martin wrote shirty letters to Missouri Supreme Court
Chief Justice Laura Denvir Stith in the controversy over the judicial selection process. Spearheading Mr. Blunt's drive against
illegal immigrants, Mr. Martin told a meeting of the Missouri Housing Commission that merely by driving by construction
sites, "every friggin' developer can figure out who is illegal." And how could they do that? "There's a bunch of Mexicans out
there, I guess some of them are probably not legal," he said.

And there was so much more. Who can forget that Mr. Martin tried to drag the Highway Patrol into politics by suggesting
that it criticize Attorney General Jay Nixon for his investigation into Ameren's Taum Sauk Dam collapse? And it was Mr.
Martin who met in the governor's office with the chairman of the state Public Service Commission and Ameren officials -
even though such ex parte meetings between regulators and utility officials are illegal when the utility has a rate request
pending. Then Mr. Martin himself accidentally disclosed this secret meeting.

And finally there was Mr. Martin in his Capitol office one night last August, sending out e-mails to pro-life groups, trying to
rally them to the cause of removing Mr. Nixon as the state's attorney in a suit brought by Planned Parenthood. When Tony
Messenger of the Springfield News-Leader filed a Sunshine Law request for those e-mails, Mr. Martin glibly replied that he'd
deleted them, thus kicking off the "Memogate" controversy.

It was the public reaction to Memogate - and Mr. Martin's subsequent firing and sliming of Scott Eckersley, Mr. Blunt's
deputy counsel, for trying to warn him that he was violating state law - that proved to be the last straw. Tuesday afternoon,
Mr. Blunt announced that Mr. Martin would be replaced by Trish Vincent, the director the Department of Revenue.

Mr. Martin did a creditable job as head of the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners, but he clearly was in over his head
in the governor's office. As a lawyer, even a combative, highly partisan lawyer, Mr. Martin should have known better. His
political views weren't the problem; it was the impolitic way he went about practicing them, as evidenced by the ugly way he
treated Mr. Eckersley, disclosing his private e-mail correspondence with lawyers and reporters and ginning up allegations
that the young attorney visited "group sex" websites.

Not since Hedley Lamarr's work for Gov. William J. LePetomaine in the movie "Blazing Saddles" has a chief of staff served
a governor so poorly as Mr. Martin served Mr. Blunt. When Mr. Blunt held a news conference Tuesday morning and
pardoned the state's ceremonial Thanksgiving turkey but declined to do the same for Mr. Martin, it was clear that his 15
months of fame were up. We're glad for the turkey.

LOAD-DATE: December 20, 2007

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

NOTES: OUR VIEW | OPEN GOVERNMENT OPINION

DOCUMENT-TYPE: EDITORIAL

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PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.

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