Confessions d'un détective privé: les dessous de la politique

Papier très intéressant de Michael Corwin. On imagine parfois les détectives observer secrètement un homme ou femme à la sortie d'un môtel, caméra à la main, relyant l'information à un adversaire politique prêt à utiliser de précieux clichés d'un présumé scandale. Corwin ne fait pas ce genre de boulot, il trouve tout son matériel dans des articles de journaux ou encore dans des documents judiciaires à la portée de tous. Il ne parvient à s'expliquer comment des hommes et des femmes croient être en mesure de faire oublier un passé parfois trouble et, surtout,  aussi accessible.

 "And unfortunately, there are plenty of fish to catch in American politics. Candidates for public office, as I’ve learned over the last 13 years, have nearly endless amounts of chutzpah; even now, it never ceases to amaze me what people think they can get away with. One candidate for the state legislature in New Mexico, where I live and do most of my work, was a retired sergeant with the county sheriff’s office who had a good shot at winning—until I found a restraining order. I pulled that file, which said he had threatened to kill his wife and told her he knew how to make her body disappear. Would you vote for him?

 Neither would the people of Valencia County. He lost in a landslide. Another candidate who had been personally recruited by New Mexico’s Republican governor, Susana Martinez, to run against the state Senate majority leader—who Martinez hates—turned out to have a restraining order on his record too, and the file said he had taken his ex-wife’s car and jewelry, cancelled all her insurance without notifying her and told her that he would do “any and everything” to hurt her. Despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars Martinez poured into her guy’s campaign, the Senate majority leader won re-election comfortably.

 Then there was the candidate who, years earlier, had been charged with felony child abuse for leaving his five-year-old daughter alone by the duck pond at the University of New Mexico while he attended class. A few years later, when someone called the police to report that he was yelling and screaming, the officers found Nazi propaganda and articles about the Unabomber in his apartment. He, too, lost by a large margin.

 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/confessions-of-a-political-private-eye-103529.html?hp=t1#.Uv-_3vl5PAw