When I first heard last year that a Republican named Dan Maes was running for governor, I assumed he was a highly successful businessman fed up with the political status quo who figured his experience would be an asset at the statehouse.
Such businessmen (and sometimes women: Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, for example) are a staple in politics. And while some turn out to be naïve about the public world they’re stepping into, others make the transition skillfully and go on to electoral victory (see: Denver mayor).
But Maes, we recently learned, is not a wealthy capitalist whose ego merely matches his achievements. While he talks a good game about the businesses he’s “built or turned around,” his entrepreneurial gumption, which is real, has failed to produce an equal degree of entrepreneurial success.
Nothing shameful about that, of course — especially since Maes seems to have been a reasonably successful sales executive at times. But what makes a salesman who for the past five years has barely kept his head above water — measured by reported income — think his destiny lies in leading the state?
Coloradans may be ready for a fresh face in the governor’s mansion, but surely they want someone with a weighty resume renowned for his management skills and resourcefulness.
With the insurgent Maes short of those credentials, Republicans seeking to weigh him in the upcoming primary against former congressman Scott McInnis, who has been damaged by a plagiarism scandal, are at sea. That’s why Maes’ campaign finance violations, which resulted in his paying a record $17,500 in fines, take on special significance in judging him. While some of the offenses are no big deal — failure to identify various contributors’ occupations and employers, for instance — others are serious, such as upwards of $43,000 he claimed in mileage since last July.
Now, that sort of sum implies a whole lot of driving — 86,000 miles, in fact, at the IRS reimbursement rate of 50 cents a mile. That’s nearly 4 hours of driving every day for a year at 60 mph. Maes told me his mileage is closer to 83,000, but that’s still a lot — and the figure naturally has raised eyebrows.
The simplest way to refute suspicion would be to produce a daily mileage log. But until recently Maes didn’t keep one. “This is a 2 4/7, seven days a week campaign,” he told me, insisting he hasn’t used his car for anything personal but church. So he simply took odometer readings, he says, and then put in for reimbursement when his campaign had funds to cover them, sometimes long after the expenses were incurred, in un-itemized increments as large as $9,460 and $5,000 (three times).
Such slipshod bookkeeping is illegal, of course, and for good reason. If it weren’t, candidates could loot their campaigns for personal gain. No private company would permit the practice, either, as Maes admitted.
To make matters stranger, the campaign amended its filings on July 6, withdrawing the largest claims from earlier this year and adding several new ones. Karen Maes, Dan’s wife and treasurer, told me it was an attempt to clarify when the driving had occurred and to extract some expenses that had been “lumped in” with mileage in the rush to file reports. “Poor judgment was used with those round $5,000 numbers,” she said.
Yes. But what difference do the amendments make when they too must be taken on faith? Maes’ campaign amounts to his first executive role in the public sphere. In the financial arena, it’s a fiasco.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
