New Carrollton, Maryland
JOHN KIMBLE, a white Republican running for Congress against black incumbent Democrat Albert Wynn in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, did not initially envision making interracial adultery the flagship issue of his campaign. Like any perennial candidate, Kimble has plenty of other issues. He espouses a $ 500-per-year tax deduction for pets, because they “help children not be so lonely.” A part-time inventor, Kimble advocates handgun control through the use of his own “Intelli-Gun technology” — a sort of Lojack for guns. Most important, he wants to shut down “houses of prostitution” within a half-mile radius of schools, forcing them to relocate in industrial zones.
But Kimble recognized a good thing when Dame Fortune brought Jessie Wynn into his life. Estranged wife of the candidate who steamrolled him in the last two elections, Jessie is now “chairwoman” of Kimble’s campaign.
And lately, some 90,000 voters in this 58 percent black district in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., have been treated to telephone calls from Jessie’s recorded voice warning: “Albert Wynn does not respect black women. He left me for a white woman. Please send your donations to Kimble for Congress.” Kimble has made available on his website four of Jessie’s recorded messages (sometimes augmented by pathos-enhancing Celine Dion background music) in which Jessie further relates how Wynn abandoned her and their 6-year-old daughter (“I’m at my mother’s and have nowhere to go”), and how he carted off the “bed we slept in.”
It’s not every day that the election gods smile on political reporters, granting them a reprieve from prescription-drug-plan minutiae to cover a race where a wife commits herself to the political annihilation of her husband. So what would normally be a sleepy, walkover contest for a four-term incumbent (accustomed to winning 85 percent of the vote) has become sideshow fodder for everyone from the Washington Post to Comedy Central. Start with the voluminous court file on the Wynns’ pending divorce.
The thrice-married congressman kicked off the festivities, filing for divorce in June 1999, seven months after he allegedly left Jessie for a white woman. From there, all hell was unleashed. Jessie, a stay-at-home mother, claims Wynn failed to pay the $ 1,630 mortgage, and initially contributed a paltry $ 700 a month in support, though he makes $ 11,390 monthly. Wynn claims Jessie’s filing bankruptcy was pure “theatrics.” Jessie claims that Wynn’s U-Haul truck left her with only eight possessions (two pictures, a disabled automobile, an end table, etc.). Additionally, Jessie — who clearly gets the best of the exchange — claims she is in need of food stamps, was driven into therapy, and was humiliated by not being permitted to ride in Wynn’s car, though he liberally shuttled his paramour around in public. Wynn’s lawyer, Allen Kruger, ranking this fissure a 9.95 on a 10-point scale of acrimonious divorces, says references to the race of “the Plaintiff’s friend” are “the height of racism.” He further criticizes Jessie for working for Wynn’s opponent, whose victory would leave Wynn “unemployed and unable to pay support.”
On October 18, Wynn was given some relief, gaining expanded custody, while the judge opined there was no evidence Wynn abused drugs, struck his wife, or sexually abused their child (allegations bandied by both Jessie and Kimble, though Wynn passed his court-appointed drug test). Still, in his latest filing, Jessie’s attorney, Stephen Armstrong, allows the possibility that the “father exposed himself to the child,” maintains that Jessie caught Wynn “freebasing with cocaine,” and that the child told Jessie after visiting her father, “Daddy is going to kill you.”
While Wynn has suggested the judge “clearly repudiated” such “wild allegations,” he’s been noticeably silent on the matter of the paramour. When I called the P.G. county public schoolteacher commonly known as “the white woman,” she abruptly hung up the phone. Calls to both Wynn’s campaign and his congressional office went unreturned. And Wynn’s attorney says of the alleged mistress, “She’s a friend. I’m not going to say she’s just a friend. . . . She’s really not a subject I’m at liberty to talk to you about.”
The allegation seems to have Wynn on the run (if a candidate could be considered on the run whose opponent has raised under $ 5,000 and is still, according to Campaigns & Elections, a 15-1 long shot). Wynn recently skipped out of a Maryland Public Television debate with Kimble, and his October campaign schedule lists only four events, including a pharmacy ribbon-cutting and a haunted house visitation. Such bashfulness is largely due to all the free media Kimble is generating; as he’s proven in the past, he’s not averse to stunt publicity. Shunned by state Republicans for his out-of-step pronouncements (he’s advocated a 10-year moratorium on immigration and once said he was seeking office because the “salary is good”), Kimble, during his 1996 run for Congress, offered to pose nude for Playgirl after he’d lost weight, bought an ab-roller, and realized that his body was “a Cadillac, not a Volkswagen.”
I catch up with Kimble at his nofrills split-level home, shared with four cats and a mangy Corgi, located in a semi-dicey area of P.G. County where Kimble says you can buy anything from “ass to grass.” Sporting an Angel Gabriel haircut and motorcycle-tough facial shrubbery, Kimble escorts me past his impressive living room cookie-jar collection, up to the war room — a one-man campaign operation that features an auto-dialer, an American flag, a bust of some classical Greek figure (“I used to know who it is”), and a computer where Kimble does most of his damage. As he shows me the latest addition to his website, he gleefully rolls up the sleeves of his dress shirt, baring two wolf tattoos on opposing forearms. (A self-described animal behaviorist who also claims to do covert surveillance for the government, Kimble is currently at work on a novel called The Wolf Prince — “a Lion King type thing.”)
Kimble is juiced after recently receiving a mysterious tip from some guy named Ray who said he possessed a videotape of Wynn doing drugs. Since Ray failed to leave his number, Kimble has just posted a notice that he’ll buy the tape. The notice appears right under the $ 5,000 reward he’s offering for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Albert Wynn for felony drug and sex abuse charges. Kimble admits this is a fishing expedition, but he’s no fool. He knows where his bread is buttered — with white women. So we are off to the farthest reaches of what Kimble already calls “my district” in his Ford Aerostar van, strewn with Whiskas Ground Kitty’s Stew cans and campaign signs. The campaign signs are of two types. One simply says “Kimble For Congress.” The other says “Wynn Left Black Woman For White” — also the theme of a van-length banner he often strings up when Jessie goes along on campaign outings, as she did during a crab feast at P.G. Community College.
Though Prince George’s is the most affluent black subrub in the country, large pockets of it still represent Canaan only to liquor store owners and Keno players. This is where Kimble chooses to evangelize. Holding his anti-Wynn sign in front of Landover Mall, Kimble takes a run at a black woman who shoots a suspicious glance. “Y’all vote?” he inquires. “No,” she says sternly, wheeling away. “We have a lot of frosty people in District Four,” he explains.
Kimble strikes out several more times with his Al Wynn/white woman pitch, until he interests a black passerby named Robert, sipping lemonade and eating french fries. “Al Wynn left his black wife for a white woman,” Kimble informs him, “You gotta vote for me.” “All right,” replies a resigned Robert. “Don’t you think that’s a good issue?” Kimble asks, not waiting for an answer. “You don’t want to get the sisters mad at you. You ever had a sister mad at you?” “All the time,” Robert winces. Robert assures Kimble he’ll vote for him, then spoils the good news by admitting he lives in Laurel, outside Kimble’s district.
Kimble’s attack pageant is enough to make one pity Wynn for getting so mercilessly demagogued on the race issue — or it would be, if Wynn didn’t so frequently do the same. A quotas fetishist, Wynn cries racism with great regularity, at one point even implying it was responsible for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, who was still white the last time anyone bothered checking. Likewise, in 1998, Wynn tried to scare black voters to the polls, sending out mailers depicting Bull Connor’s baton-wielding police force in a statewide effort to unfairly depict Ellen Sauerbrey, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, as a racist (several black Democrats dissented).
It’s an irony that’s not lost on Kimble, who, in a naked pander to P.G.’s burgeoning Hispanic electorate, says that pan-partisan, post-Gingrich Republicans have lost “their cojones,” failing to go on the attack when warranted. It’s unclear, however, whether Kimble’s tactics are working. As we post up in a Giant parking lot in Bladensburg with Kimble displaying his sign, one agitated woman demands our phone number, while another breaks into giggles as Kimble awkwardly incorporates dated Afro-centric expressions like “perpetratin’.” Most others dash straight for the automatic doors, their coupons flapping, as they skirt gutter politics to take advantage of Giant’s everyday low prices.
All this rejection makes Kimble reflective. “I hate to hurt people,” he says. In fact, Kimble might yet make an ideal 21st-century Republican. He says if his opponent wasn’t such a “dirtbag,” he’d simply campaign on the issues. After all, children need pets, and whorehouses need relocating.
Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
