Verdict Against the D.A.

It must have been a tough week up there on Mike Bradbury’s Hang ‘Em High Ranch in Ojai. A hailstorm of sorts had come sweeping out of nowhere, and it was all coming down on Bradbury’s head.

The storm broke as a Times story revealed that Bradbury, who earns $131,804 annually, has been receiving an additional $639 per month in federal Section 8 housing funds the past two years for renting a small home to his mother on his $558,000 ranch.

There was something about this story, more than most, that touched off instant outrage. Not to mention a very prompt move by U.S. Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo to review whether “high income” landlords should be allowed to continue to rent to relatives.

But Bradbury, normally the most astute of politicians, never seemed to really understand what it was that had so many people shaking their heads and wondering what the county’s living symbol of personal integrity could possibly have been doing.

Maybe it was just that his first instinct was to get out of the storm. End the unexpected crisis as quickly as possible. Then take some time later to think it all through.

But Bradbury didn’t handle this one very well.

Normally, we live in a world where the most profound human questions are reduced to slogans. We hear about family values and welfare reform, and sometimes we even hear complaints about things like welfare for the rich. But these are just dry words with no emotional punch.

This story, however, brought the slogans to life. It made people think about what we really mean when we talk about family values. And who needs welfare and who doesn’t. And the kind of country we really want for ourselves.

It made me think of the words of an old friend, a man named John Maher, who spent a good part of his life trying to deal with social problems, including the way the elderly are treated in this country.

“You know what you think of a family that doesn’t take care of its own. You think they are less than decent,” he once told me. “And a society that doesn’t take care of its old people is less than decent too.”

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Bradbury defended himself at first last week by talking about his mother’s pride. How she doesn’t want to be a burden on him, or his brother who is a judge, or his other brother, who is a college teacher now. How she had earned the right to the HUD subsidies she has received for more than 20 years.

His solution was to announce that he would keep his mother on the HUD subsidy rolls. But, at the same time, he would donate the $639 he has been receiving to charities, thus neutralizing the criticism that he was personally profiting from the arrangement.

But, for a lot of people, that wasn’t any solution at all. It failed to even address the key issue: that Bradbury’s mother is still taking the place of somebody else who needs society’s help far more than she does.

There are thousands of applicants on the waiting lists for HUD assistance in Ventura County alone, so many that they don’t even take the names of new applicants anymore. As likely as not, there is a single mother out there next up on the list who could probably use that help a lot more than Bradbury’s mother.

It doesn’t require a lot of imagination to picture that other mother, the one who doesn’t have a district attorney and a judge and a college teacher who most likely are pulling down $300,000 a year or so among them.

Let’s say she has a child or two. And that she doesn’t have too many options in life. And that the kids could probably use some new clothes. And probably haven’t been to too many movies lately. And that simply being able to live from paycheck to paycheck sounds like a pretty wonderful thing to her.

It’s not easy trying to tell somebody like Mike Bradbury that maybe he should think about all this just a little bit longer. But he should. And when he’s done thinking, he should call his brothers. And they should pool their resources and collectively take the steps necessary to care for their mother for the rest of her life.

And they should tell her that giving up her monthly housing checks isn’t really a question of pride. It’s a question of doing the right thing by somebody else who needs the money a whole lot more.