What do U.S. Representative Chris Murphy, the state Democratic
Party nominee for the U .S. Senate, and Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican
Party nominee for president, have in common?
They are both victims of misleading ads, and those who
initiated the ads refused to pull them after they had been shown to be pock
marked with errors.
A Democratic primary ad criticizing Mr. Murphy approved by
Susan Bysiewicz was found to contain errors of a minor nature. The ad claimed
Mr. Murphy was the number one recipient of Wall Street hedge fund contributors
in the nation. Mr. Murphy was number four, not number one.
Mr. Murphy’s lawyers at one point threatened to sue Connecticut
television stations carrying the ad, even though the stations were obligated by
law to run it. Eventually, Mrs. Bysiewicz pulled her ad, and everyone breathed
a sigh of relief; no legal suits were filed.
The anti-Romney ad -- the handiwork of Priorities USA, a
super PAC founded by former White House spokesman Bill Burton who, despite
glaring faults in the scurrilous ad, refused to pull it. -- is much more
egregious. Mr. Burton’s ad strongly suggests that Mr. Romney is responsible for
the death of a cancer victim, the wife of steelworker Joe Soptic, who lost his
job and health care benefits after Mr. Romney's Bain Capital closed a steel plant
in Kansas City, Mo., in 2001.
Mr. Soptic describes in the ad how his wife developed cancer
and strongly suggests that Mr. Romney is to blame, his non-portable insurance
policy having elapsed when he lost his job -- owing, one supposes, to Mr.
Romney ungovernable greed.
Several difficulties soon emerged that overthrew the planted
axioms in the ad: Mr. Soptic's wife died in 2006, five years after the company
that employed her husband closed. Mrs. Soptic had the use of her own health
insurance following her husband’s unemployment and lost her coverage after she too
lost her job – not, one supposes, as a result of Mr. Romney’s greed.
The SuperPAC is the bitter fruit of campaign finance reform
measures authored by Shays-Meehan in the U.S. House and McCain-Feingold in the
U.S. Senate. The “Shays” of Shays-Meehan is former U.S. Representative Chris
Shays, a Republican running for the same seat in the U.S. Senate as Mr.
Murphy.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a decision firmly anchored
in Constitutional law that the campaign finance bill could not restrict large
campaign donations issuing from corporations or unions without violating First
Amendment rights. While such donations could constitutionally be prohibited to
political parties, large donations assembled by SuperPACs were permitted --
provided the SuperPAC was not formally connected to a candidate or party. SuperPACs
then proceeded to use the money to produce ads and other in-kind contributions
useful to favored candidates or critical of their opponents (LINK).
Thus were born in the same legislative womb and at the same
time the twin evils of SuperPACs and negative campaign ads.
Mrs. Bysiewicz is not yet a SuperPAC, but Priorities USA is
– and the connections between Priorities USA and President Barack Obama, who
benefits greatly from the SuperPAC’s ads, are, others have pointed out, just a
little too close for comfort.
Priorities USA was founded by former White House spokesman
Bill Burton; his associate, Robert Gibbs, served as White House press secretary
when Mr. Burton was his deputy for about two years during the first half of Mr.
Obama's term.
Even some Democrats and their well-wishers in the media are
not pleased with the SuperPac’s obvious connections to the Obama campaign.
Former U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said
the ad was "over the edge," and Lanny Davis, once an adviser to
President Clinton, dubbed it "disgusting."
Mika Brzezinski, the progressive co-host of the
"Morning Joe" show on MSNBC and a face familiar to news watchers in
Connecticut, said that Obama campaign officials were "not telling the
truth" about how much they knew about the commercial.
In view of the stringent provisos laid down by the Supreme
Court, the campaign officials probably have lawyers attached to their legs the
way some criminals on probation are burdened with ankle monitors.
Everyone in such elaborate charades is supposed to be
politically disconnected; but in fact, the producers of such ads and the
candidates whose campaigns they “indirectly” promote are in some cases professionally
and ideologically connected at their brain stems.
Campaign financing has made it nearly impossible for
political parties to fund party chosen candidates. Incumbent politicians – who
have now become their own petit political parties and who complain bitterly
that they spend too large a part of their time financing their own campaigns --
wanted it that way. And incumbents need SuperPACS to shuttle campaign funds around
a U.S. Supreme Court ruling soundly grounded in constitutional and statutory
law.
No one has yet asked Mr. Murphy, the victim of a false ad,
whether he feels Mr. Romney’s pain.
He probably does not. In September, Mr. Murphy likely will face
a self-funded Republican candidate of means. And he will need the services,
financial and otherwise, offered to him by his very own SuperPAC, “Connecticut's
Future,” whose chairman, Chris VanDeHoef, a Hartford lobbyist, was five years
ago a groomsman at Murphy's wedding party.
Mr. VanDeHoft also had been the executive director of the
Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association, one of those jolly journalists who buy
ink by the barrel and who, one presumes, still is on speaking terms with his
colleagues in Connecticut’s left of center media. Other members of Mr. Murphy’s SuperPAC
are former executive director
and general counsel of the State Elections Enforcement Commission Jeff Garfield
and Kevin Graf, former chief of
staff to state Senate Democrats. The keeper of the coins is Attorney Joseph Taborsak, who will serve
as treasurer of Mr. Murphy’s new bride, to which he has plighted his troth till
death do them part.
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