Published: November 02, 2008 01:44 am      

McGraw: Real foe is U.S. Chamber of Commerce

CHARLESTON — The way West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw sees it, he’s not running against Republican Dan Greear. His real opponent in Tuesday’s election is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

McGraw says his list of enemies grows each time his office wins a case against unscrupulous debt collectors, mortgage companies, funeral home operators and other businesses.

Since becoming West Virginia’s top attorney in 1992, his office has forced numerous companies, including those in the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, to pay a total of nearly $2 billion to settle claims they engaged in questionable business practices in the Mountain State

As a result, “They are really twisted out of shape,” he said.

McGraw says the national chamber, with backing from the Institute for Justice, the Center for Individual Freedom and Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, is targeting his re-election effort to try “to teach the other AGs a lesson.”

While protecting consumers is an important aspect of the job that will pay about $95,000 next year, Greear says it should not discourage business. He vows to be no less vigilant against shoddy businesses, but more cooperative and less antagonistic than he says McGraw has been.

Greear said McGraw’s main goal seems to be “how much money we can get from businesses, not how can we get businesses to follow the law.”

The 40-year-old lawyer who served in the state House of Delegates from 1995 to 1996 also chided McGraw for picking on some law-abiding companies over what he characterized as nothing more than typos.

McGraw has taken plenty of criticism from Greear, the U.S. chamber, lawmakers and others over a 2004 multimillion settlement McGraw brokered with Purdue Pharma, the makers of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. Those critics accuse McGraw of usurping lawmakers by distributing settlement money to gain favor with voters and rewarding political donors by hiring them as special prosecutors.

McGraw, 71, defends his actions, saying the money was spent as the court ordered, funding projects that directly benefit addicts.

Beneficiaries of the money include day reporting centers for nonviolent substance abusing offenders, a new pharmacy program at the University of Charleston, prosecutor training, a drug abuse hot line and a statewide media campaign about prescription drugs, four juvenile drug courts, and early intervention programs for drug users, among others.

The various legal fees were determined by the courts, not McGraw, and were paid by the companies who broke the law, not taxpayers, he said.

Greear said those actions are the primary basis for two of the three things he would change about the $4-million-a-year office that employs about 200, including 69 attorneys. He promises to never enter into a settlement in which the attorney general decides how the money will be distributed. He vows to ask legislators to set clear limits for hiring special attorneys. And he vows to never put his name on promotional material used to advertise services the office provides.

Greear faults McGraw for using office funds to print his name on items promoting the office’s consumer protection services. McGraw says the items have helped increase awareness of the service, while noting that the number of calls from consumers has jumped from about 1,300 a year when he first took office to more than 13,000 a year.

McGraw laid blame for the much-publicized purchase of nearly $142,000 worth of promotional materials on former employee Debra Lynn Whanger, whom he fired in August 2004. She later sued, and McGraw agreed to settle for more than $125,000.

Greear could pose McGraw’s biggest political challenge yet after beating Morgantown lawyer Hiram Lewis for the Republican nomination. Four years ago, Lewis, whose campaign was bolstered by campaign ads bankrolled by Massey Energy Chief Executive Officer Don Blankenship, garnered 49.6 percent of the vote to McGraw’s 50.4 percent.

Though the two campaigns have spent about the same — Greear’s $206,390 to McGraw’s $189,315 — Greear is getting a $700,000 boost from the national and state chambers of commerce, which launched a last-minute batch of television ads last week attacking McGraw.

The chamber has hired Mentzer Media Services to wage its 11th-hour siege of McGraw. The Maryland-based firm was the chief producer of the attack ads from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that in 2004 made unsubstantiated allegations about Democratic nominee John Kerry’s decorated military record in Vietnam.

McGraw has also been targeted by numerous stories critical of his actions in the West Virginia Record, which the national chamber owns.

Greear says the McGraw name is “very polarizing” across the state. The way he sees it, McGraw “gets 45 percent of the vote if he doesn’t do anything. I get 45 percent of the vote if I don’t do anything. We’re fighting for the 10 percent in the middle.”

McGraw, a father of four, grew up in a rural coal mining area of Wyoming County, enlisted in the Army when he was 17 and used the GI bill to attend West Virginia University. While in school, he worked as a janitor at the university and started a business that delivered homemade birthday cakes to students that were paid for by their parents.

McGraw served from 1976 to 1988 as a justice and chief justice on the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, where he supported school funding and the rights of working people and against using eminent domain for private purpose.

Greear, a father of two, has worked for several Charleston-area law firms since 1992. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Liberty University and his law degree from West Virginia University.

While a delegate, Greear fought unsuccessfully to ban same-sex marriages in West Virginia, to require women seeking abortions to wait 24 hours, view photographs of fetuses and read about possible physical and psychological side effects of abortion and to disallow federal money for abortions at a time when federal law already prohibited the funding.

While warning against the evils of gambling, Greear also sought to require minors with children to attend school to receive welfare benefits and allow school officials access to the records of youths involved in violent crimes and to force all youths over the age of 14 who are charged with violent crimes to be tried as adults.

Greear said if he learned anything from his years in the Legislature it is to be “less confrontational.”

“My positions haven’t changed,” he said. But “I would probably be less of a bomb-thrower.”

As for his run for attorney general, Greear says, “I am not running to be the conservative alternative of Darrell McGraw. I’m running to end the activism in the attorney general’s office.”