Days after 2nd District Rep. Bob Etheridge got more national attention for manhandling a questioner on a Washington, D.C., street than he had in a quarter-century of elected office, another man comes forward to say he got similar treatment from the Democrat more than a decade ago.
The Pilot in Southern Pines reports that in 1996, when Etheridge was running for his first term in Congress (and before the days of cheap camera phones), Brandon Leslie, then a senior at Pinecrest High School, approached Etheridge at a football game and asked him a question about an education issue.
Read on.
He said Etheridge didn’t answer his question, so he pressed him two more times.
“And that’s when he grabbed me by the shoulders, he shook me, and I’ll never forget it, he said, ‘Son, you need to learn to respect your elders,'” he said by phone on Wednesday. “I was just so taken aback, I think my jaw just dropped, and he walked off.”
Leslie said he was angrier about Etheridge’s attitude and “patronizing” tone than the physical contact.
“It wasn’t to hurt me, it wasn’t to harm me,” he says. “It was that he was irritated and wanted to get my attention.”
Leslie said the incident caused somewhat of a firestorm at the time, and he was contacted by a few newspapers, but no stories ever appeared.
That should be easy enough to verify.
Leslie is now an attorney in Oxford, Miss., and says he’s both a Democrat and “supports of the Obama agenda.”
Even so, his flashback of that evening brought up a thought many of us had about the seven-term congressman.
“He’s kind of a bully,” Leslie said.
