Daniel Rubin: State worker's breach a sign of bigger ethics problem

In the constellation of official wrongdoing, Michael Daniel's reach for the stars barely registers on the naked eye.

But it's a nice little illumination of the muck that is Pennsylvania politics.

Daniel works as a legislative aide in the Northwest Philadelphia office of State Rep. Cherelle Parker, a Democrat. The boss was on her honeymoon Tuesday, Aug. 3, when Daniel e-mailed David L. Cohen, executive vice president of Comcast, hoping to shake loose a few dollars from the area's biggest piggy bank.

"I'm writing to ask for the support of Comcast or even yourself," Daniel pitched. "As you are going to read I'm the Head Coach of the Frankford Chargers Pop Warner Junior Midget Football Team and I happen to be employed by State Representative Cherelle L. Parker, as her Legislative Assistant. We are in dire need of financial support to purchase much needed equipment/supplies, Mr. Cohen can you please help us."

Good cause, wrong stationery.

Not only did Daniel put his title to his sign-off, he sent his e-mail from his General Assembly account at 11:56 a.m. on a workday.

I got a copy of Daniel's e-mail from an anonymous tipster at Comcast who asked:

"What's going on here? Influence peddling? Abuse of tax-payer's money and trust? Solicitation for private agendas on the tax-payer's time and dime? Incredible abuse of position is what it is!!!"

I doubt Cohen was the tipster, because he tends to swim a little higher in the water than that and knows that taxpayer doesn't take a hyphen. Besides, he says he wasn't bothered by the nudge-nudge tone of the pitch:

"To be perfectly candid, I didn't even associate the 'ask' with Cherelle or her office."

But the state rep did. She told me Monday that she hadn't been aware of her aide's bid for bucks until hours earlier, when someone from Comcast sent her a copy. She got Daniel on the phone and "made sure he knew this is not acceptable and something I don't condone."

When she explained that he couldn't hit someone up for support on state time and in her name, "he said he didn't think anything of it."

Had he never heard of something called Bonusgate? Or the fact that a state grand jury thinks the legislature could do a better job if it whacked 40 percent of its staff - the largest in the nation - and became a part-time body?

A week before Daniel's e-mail, a newspaper article captured the nagging essence of the problem in one quick exchange. At Rep. Bill DeWeese's preliminary hearing on corruption charges, an aide testified that he had asked DeWeese whether it was OK that the aide was spending most of his time fund-raising.

DeWeese took a deep breath, the aide said, and replied, "Our saving grace is that everybody does it."

When is it going to stop? Parker told me she would reprimand Daniel, who joined her staff in March. He was not available for comment.

All employees of House Democrats must attend a two-hour basic ethics session during their employment, according to Brett Marcy, caucus spokesman.

Marcy said that Daniel, who is in his 50s, had also signed a statement that he had read the updated employee handbook, which addresses the appropriate use of state resources, including e-mail accounts.

Maybe there needs to be more than a short course.

"This is one of those patterns of behavior that hopefully by now we would have broken," said Barry Kaufman, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania.

Tim Potts, founder of the activist group Democracy Rising, said he was troubled that Daniel was relatively new. "The culture got to him already that says, 'This is OK.' "

I mentioned that it was a tiny indiscretion, compared with former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo's trying to shake down Verizon for a $50 million contribution to a nonprofit he commanded.

"Tiny," Potts replied, "is what takes you down the slippery slope. And the slope of the legislature is way too slippery already."

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