Last Friday the governor chose Gabe Gore to be the new Circuit Attorney. I’m not certain when exactly he will take the helm of the CAO. He has announced that he will be resigning from his partnership at Dowd Bennett at the end of this week. He will then need to be formally sworn in. Until that time, the interim Circuit Attorney appointed by the governor will stay in charge of the CAO and run things “with the assistance, not help,” (the Governor’s distinction) of numerous assistants from the Attorney General’s Office.
I am not happy with the governor’s pick. Certainly Gore is a very smart, hard-working, ambitious lawyer. He has an impressive resume: an ex-Assistant U.S. Attorney who rose to partnership positions with two silk stocking law firms, Lewis Rice and Dowd Bennett. Yet when his name was first floated as a candidate to replace Gardner, I didn’t take that suggestion as a serious possibility (same with many of the eighteen candidates) because I didn’t think he was particularly qualified to run the CAO.
What concerns me is what he doesn’t bring to the job. He hasn’t really practiced in state court: he has never tried a state case, he has never practiced state criminal law, and he has never been a state prosecutor (federal prosecution is very different). He isn’t even familiar with the 22nd Judicial Circuit (at least I’ve never even seen him in the City courthouses, and I’m there almost every day): he doesn’t know the people he will be dealing with on a daily basis, he hasn’t had to live with the problems he will be facing, and he isn’t intimately familiar with the systems in place in the City (especially compared with some of the other candidates). He has — just look at his resume — been in an ivory tower quite removed from state criminal practice his entire legal career.
It’s as if a teacher who had previously worked at Priory, MICDS, and John Borroughs — the elite, private suburban high schools — then took a job at a failing St. Louis city public school as principal. Certainly that resume proves that the person is an extremely competent teacher, but experience at Priory, MICDS, and John Borroughs will not acquaint them with the issues, problems, and situations they will find at a failing public high school. Those are two different educational worlds. Gore has spent his career in an entirely different legal world than the one he is about to take on.
That’s not to say he can’t succeed. I hope he does. He is by all accounts a very capable individual, and people like that more often than not rise to the occasion. And, he certainly can’t do worse than Gardner. It’s just that there were persons better suited and prepared for fixing the CAO than Gore — persons that had the experience he is lacking. They would have hit the ground running and had a better chance of making a significant difference more quickly.
So, while I’m not happy with the selection of Gabe Gore, I am hopeful that he is up to the Herculean task of saving the CAO.
