| | Republican official seen failing sobriety test in police video
Says Palin nomination helps him by showing "everybody who's running for political office is as human as those sitting back home"A Republican councilman in Columbia, SC was arrested for drunken driving in July, the third DUI arrest for Paul Lindemann, who is currently running for reelection.
His local paper, the Rock Hill Herald, has now obtained a police video of the arrest through a Freedom of Information Act request and has made it public. According to the police report, Lindemann was "highly intoxicated" and "significantly impaired" and had nearly run into two motorcyclists several times.
In the video, Lindemann agrees to take a sobriety test but repeatedly fails to get through the alphabet, attempting instead to segue from "W" back to "H." He has even more trouble counting backwards from 32 to 18, stammering, "32-31-32-30 -- 31-32-31-32-33-33 -- 31-32-30-29 -- 19-18-17-16-18 -- 20-21-22."
He is then arrested.
A month following his arrest, Lindemann was seen driving to a City Council meeting, even though his license had been suspended. He offered the reporter who approached him a flurry of conflicting explanations for why he was allowed to drive, all of them apparently false.
"I'm going to get everything resolved with the charge, and we're going to win in November as well," Lindemann insisted after the video was released. He also suggested that vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's current problems may help him, because "people have started to recognize that everybody who's running for political office is as human as those sitting back home."
Lindemann's case is reminiscent of that of New York City Republican Congressman Vito Fossella, who announced after a drunk driving arrest last spring that he would not be running this fall. However, there are currently rumors that Fossella, too, is plotting to get back on the ticket.
This video is from The Charlotte Observer, broadcast September 20, 2008.
Download video via RawReplay.com
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