Fouling Up

Taxes and babies dog two pols

Into the gap between words and actions has fallen many a politician, as two more discovered to their sorrow last week.

In Iowa, Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Roxanne Conlin, 38, attacked the G.O.P. for seeking to monopolize "the American dream" by such elitist devices as tax shelters. Conlin was the clear favorite over her Republican opponent, Lieutenant Governor Terry Branstad, until she released a financial statement disclosing that she and her husband James, a millionaire real estate broker, had paid no state income taxes last year and only $2,995 in federal taxes, largely because of paper losses suffered on real estate investments. Republicans have gleefully denounced her hypocrisy in attacking tax shelters even as she profited from them. Says Executive Editor James Gannon of the Des Moines Register: "The tax issue has stopped her campaign dead in the water."

In California, archconservative State Senator John Schmitz, 51, earned headlines last December by referring to supporters of abortion as "bull dykes" and describing a legislative hearing on the subject as filled with "hard Jewish and arguably female faces." A former Congressman, Schmitz and his wife of 28 years, Mary, have seven children. He is apparently also the father of two more, as a consequence of an extramarital liaison that came to light last week after welfare officials petitioned a court for protective custody of a 13-month-old boy. They charged the parents--Carla Verne Stuckle, 43, a longtime worker for conservative Republican causes and one "John Schmitz," who "lives out of the home"--with neglecting or deliberately abusing the child. Human hair had been wrapped so tightly around his penis that the organ was nearly severed. During a conversation with Judge William Murray, in an effort to have the child returned to Stuckle, Schmitz confessed that he was the boy's father. Stuckle claims that Schmitz is also the father of her three-week-old daughter. The scandal will have little impact on Schmitz's ebbing political fortunes: his state senate seat will be eliminated in November because of redistricting.

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