Alex Constantine - November 3, 2010
by Moe Tkacik | Washington City Paper | Nov. 3, 2010
Meet Fran Coombs. He works for Scott Rasmussen, the pollster and fawning John Fund “profile” subject who is now, once again, for the gazillionth time since his polling outfit predicted Bush would beat Gore by a nine point margin in 2000, “under fire” for being potentially biased somehow toward conservative candidates. This is a story, now that someone in the media got a half a night’s sleep and started wondering how the fuck Harry Reid still has a job in spite of the Nevada electorate’s having multiple times in a row pounded it over the heads of those trusty pollsters how much they hated his guts.
I’m not sure what more I can add to these scurrilous allegations except to point out that, as I explain in this week’s cover story on Fran Coombs’ former employer the Washington Times, Fran Coombs has been accused of many, many things, over the course of his rich and storied career at the newspaper, from use of the N-word to “forcible” face-sucking of subordinates to supporting abortion rights on grounds of preserving the dominance of the “white race” to being married to a white supremacist neo-Nazi sympathizer. And I am not sure what to make of any of those things, since a few people I know and trust tell me all those accusations are total lies (and also, his wife is wrote a pretty thoughtful review of this book on Wal-Mart.)
But I will also point out that the one thing Fran Coombs has never been accused of (as far as I know) is a shortage of bias in favor of Republican candidates, policies, talking points etc. So if you found yourself at some point during the election cycle irrationally fearing that Barney Frank might not pull through last night or something along those lines, he might have been the guy responsible for putting that idea in your head, and he might have been doing it on purpose, just because he can.