They train us journalists to grab the reader’s attention in the first couple paragraphs of a story–the so-called lede. It’s tough to do it much better than today’s dispatch on Time.com from Portland, Oregon.
The cast of the scandal in Portland, Ore., has a certain ring to it: Sam Adams. Bob Ball. Beau Breedlove and his dog Lolita … “Everyone has porn names!” says Mark Wiener with a laugh. “Until yesterday, it had never occurred to me that the worst offending name was mine.”
Wiener (pronounced Wee-ner) is one of Oregon’s most influential political consultants and a former — and now disheartened — campaign adviser to the protagonist in this political soap opera. That would be Sam Adams, the new mayor of Portland and the first openly gay man to lead a major American city. Then there’s Bob Ball, an openly gay local real estate developer who once had mayoral ambitions himself. In 2007, Ball hinted that Adams’ mentoring relationship with a former legislative intern, Beau Breedlove (now 21), was, in fact, a sexual one that had begun when the young man was just 17.
Read on here. (If anyone has a competing submission, let me know in the comments.)