Palm Beach County already familiar with jailed candidate on Election Day
If Donald Trump’s manifest misdeeds land him behind bars while seeking public office, he wouldn’t be the first Palm Beach County resident to find himself in this predicament.
That distinction goes to H. Scott McCary, who in 1986 was the Republican candidate for a seat on the Palm Beach County Commission.
McCary was a 57-year-old accountant from West Palm Beach who got about 30 percent of the vote in his quest for the county’s top governing body, even though he spent election night watching the movie, The Dirty Dozen, from the Palm Beach County Jail while phoning for tally updates from a payphone in the lockup.
Like Trump, McCary had a string of unrelated criminal charges hanging over his head while he attempted to seek public office.
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For starters, McCary failed to submit campaign financing reports to the county, which began accruing $50-per-day fines. When he finally paid up, the check bounced. Twice. His check to pay his filing fee bounced too.
Four months before the election, he got charged with grand theft for walking out on a $604 hotel bill at a Hampton Inn in West Palm Beach, something he called a misunderstanding.
After posting bail in that case, he got charged with aggravated assault in Arcadia in DeSoto County following an argument he had with a disabled man riding a three-wheel bicycle. McCary was charged with intentionally driving his Cadillac into the bicycle-riding man. Like Trump, McCary didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.
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“I did bounce him with the car,” McCary told a news reporter at the time.
McCary left DeSoto County before he could be arrested. There was a warrant out for his arrest there as he returned to Palm Beach County to campaign for office.
About a week before the election, that took the form of sitting at the bar at Speakeasy, a popular watering hole at the time on the 100 block of Clematis Street in West Palm Beach. The bartender phoned police after McCary ordered nine drinks then walked out on his tab. It wasn’t exactly a well-crafted plan. He left his magazine behind at the bar. The magazine had a mail tab on the cover that had his name and address on it.
He later put it this way: “I’ve just got to stay away from Jack Daniels.”
So, in the closing days of the November election, he was charged with the misdemeanor “defrauding an innkeeper”, arrested and locked up on $750 bail. McCary called his incarceration “good publicity,” saying that his serial troubles with the law were “getting me known to the people.”
He got an emergency hearing a few days before the election to ask a judge to temporarily free him from jail so he could do some last-minute campaigning for office.
“I assure you that if I’m released on my own recognizance, I will not leave this county because I’m running for political office,” he told the judge.
The judge denied his motion and sent him back to jail.
McCary lost the county commission race to Democratic candidate, Carol Roberts, who was the former mayor of West Palm Beach at the time. The election turned out to be embarrassing for both parties. Local Democrats were amazed that McCary still got 30.1 percent of the vote, and Republicans, who had unsuccessfully tried to remove him from the ballot, were embarrassed not to have a more viable candidate for the race.
“Big vote for jailed man has both parties scared,” a post-election headline in The Miami Herald read.
McCary was so buoyed by the results that he announced he’d be switching parties so he could be a Democrat running against one of two Republican incumbents on the ballot during the next election cycle.
“I’m not being braggadocious, but I feel I can do a better job than both of them,” he said.
But he never did run again, and now his story seems a little quaint. If he were running today, the radical remains of what used to be the Republican party would have made him a persecuted hero — a victim of “The Deep County.”
The old man on the tricycle would be “a Soros-backed America-hater.” And the multiple prosecutions filed against McCary after he had become his party’s candidate for office would be called a “witchhunt.”
“They couldn’t get him on the hotel bill or the aggravated battery, so they planted Jack Daniels evidence against him in the West Palm Beach bar,” the line would go. “This is banana republic tactics.”
The bartender would be called “a Marxist, Communist, fascist psycho” and he and his family would probably have to go into hiding as a result of numerous death threats.
Instead of being embarrassed about McCary's candidacy, local Republicans would be parroting each other by spewing outrage over "the weaponization of the hospitality industry against Republicans" and calling for an investigation of McCary’s opponent, citing reckless, baseless allegations about her and her family.
Meanwhile, McCary would be raising loads of money off his crimes and emboldening social media talk of a “Second Amendment solution” to the county commission race. And even before votes would be counted, his followers would be calling the election “rigged.”
How far we’ve fallen. Having a candidate behind bars during an election is nothing new. The new part is making dishonest excuses and deflections about his obvious self-inflicted crimes.
Frank Cerabino is a columnist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at fcerabino@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump not first Palm Beach County resident jailed while seeking office
