Friday, December 22nd, 2006...7:48 am
Geez, Greg, Are You Trying to Get Me Into Trouble?
Greg Patterson flatters me too much over at Espresso Pundit by saying that newly elected congressman Gabrielle Giffords should hire me at her office. Well, thank you for the sentiment, Greg, but there are plenty of very well qualified people in line in front of me.
In fact, there has been a development on that point. I had heard about this days ago, but I was going to keep quiet about it. Patterson posted it on his blog, so what the heck. Scooped on Tucson political news by Greg Patterson? Will the humilation ever stop?
Giffords will be hiring C. J. Karamargin to handle the press for her. An excellent choice, since Karamargin was a political writer at the Star for years. He left the star at the beginning of the political season to write about food for the Citizen.
While at the Star, Karamargin developed a good relationship with Raúl Grijalva’s press staffer, Natalie Luna. Karamargin also has a great deal of respect for Grijalva. One of the amusing back stories over Grijalva’s reign in congress has been how many press staffers Jim Kolbe’s office has gone through, which led some of us to speculate that this is because he all of a sudden did not have the near monopoly of the press that he had before and was a bit frustrated. My point here is that with two members that both have strong press operations, it would be easy for there to be conflict between the two offices. Between Karamargin and Luna, I don’t see that there would be anything except maybe a friendly rivalry. These two people out there flying the flag for their offices can only be a good thing for the Democratic party in Southern Arizona.
I recieved an e-mail from a reader complaining that Karamargin is still getting stories printed in the Citizen, and this is an unseemly conflict of interest. I disagree. If Karamargin was still writing about politics, I could see the point. I can’t see where Karamargin writing about the wonders of the Christmas tamal creates a conflict of interest on the level of say, writing a dismissive article about charges against a congressman then going off to work for that congressman’s lawyer’s publicity firm. I can’t think off hand of anyone that has done that…
NB - A fella from Phoenix wrote me last week and asked about Karamargin, and I said, “naw.” The next day, someone told me that he was being considered. What the heck do I know?
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