Porn scandal poses risk for Corbett campaign

It's safe to say there's no "Weird Porn Scandal" index tab in the standard political campaign playbook.

Yet Gov. Corbett has been forced to deal with just that almost daily since his successor as state attorney general, Democrat Kathleen Kane, released the names of high-level officials from his tenure as A.G. who sent or received pornographic e-mails on state computers. Two appointees in his administration have quit as a result; a third refuses to resign.

The timing could not be worse for the Republican governor, already an underdog as he faces voters a little more than three weeks from now. Corbett never received or sent any of the smut, says he was unaware of it - and is furious.

If he had learned of the e-mails as attorney general, "I would have gone ballistic," he told The Inquirer Editorial Board.

Nonetheless, strategists and analysts say, the porn affair poses potential political risk for Corbett by undermining his image as a straight-arrow law enforcer, and by suggesting he is a disengaged executive.

The biggest problem, experts say: It is a distraction that devours precious campaign time.

"This is a momentum-zapper," said Chris Borick, pollster and political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. "The governor needs every break he could possibly get. Based on polls we're seeing, he needs a historic comeback."

E. Christopher Abruzzo, Corbett's secretary of environmental protection, resigned last week, as did a top aide.

"You don't want to ask for the resignation of cabinet officers in the final days of a reelection campaign," said another veteran Pennsylvania pollster, G. Terry Madonna of Franklin and Marshall College. "It reinforces a perception that this administration can't move its agenda, that it's caught up in too many internal situations."

Democratic nominee Tom Wolf, a York businessman, leads Corbett by an average of 15 percentage points in public polls. A Quinnipiac University survey last week found Wolf up 17 points - respondents were interviewed after Kane released the first batch of e-mails Sept. 25, but the pollsters did not ask about the scandal.

The network of smut-swapping came to light while Kane's office was reviewing Corbett's prosecution of former Pennsylvania State University football coach Jerry Sandusky on child sex-abuse charges. During her successful 2012 campaign, Kane suggested Corbett had played politics with the case (a claim her own investigator debunked); she also promised to smash the "old-boy network" of Harrisburg.

What could fuel perception of such a network more than erotic e-mails exchanged by male prosecutors, investigators, even judges?

Plus, for a governor sometimes seen as insensitive to women - starting with his 2012 comment that they need only "close your eyes" if ultrasounds were required before abortions - the scandal was the last thing he needed.

"I've heard people in line at Starbucks and the grocery store talking about it," said Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist who runs Fresh Start, a political action committee aiding Wolf. "You can tell it's caught the attention of even people who don't follow politics closely."

The PAC, which has specialized in efforts to mau-mau Corbett with attacks on matters large and small, last week criticized a Harrisburg communications consultancy that has contracts with the campaign and the state GOP for employing a former Corbett spokesman who was outed as having received some of the e-mails. (He has said he neither opened them nor forwarded them.)

Wolf, too, has mentioned the e-mails in the debates as an indication of the "culture" in the A.G.'s Office under Corbett, but Democrats have mostly let the slow drip of revelations from Kane tell the tale.

"Everywhere he [Corbett] goes, reporters are asking him about this stuff," Mikus said. "I don't know how he gets around it." If Corbett says nothing, he looks like he's dodging; if he responds, there's another story. "He's between a rock and a hard place," Mikus said.

Alan Novak, a Republican strategist and former state party chairman, said Corbett has to battle through the distraction even as he tries to exploit an "opening" that Wolf has left by declining to discuss details of his vow to change the state's tax system.

"It is a dose of bad luck that really has nothing to do with his job as governor," Novak said last week. "It's a distraction away from the effort to scare the pants off people about what Wolf is going to do to their taxes."

It wouldn't hurt to tie Wolf to President Obama, whose approval ratings have tanked in recent months and whose name raises the ire of the GOP base, Novak said. He acknowledged such a rallying tactic might not be as easy as it was when he was a rookie Chester County Republican chairman in 1994 and a Democrat was president.

"We just stuck up signs all over the county: 'Send the White House a message, vote Republican!' " Novak said.

At the end of this race, maybe that tactic will wind up in the campaign playbook - when an entry is written on dealing with porn scandals.

tfitzgerald@phillynews.com

215-854-2718

@tomfitzgerald

www.inquirer.com/bigtent