Democrats have launched a new website, You Don’t Know Dudley.com, attacking GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Dudley. It’s a peculiar mix of new stuff, old stuff and some just plain silly stuff.
“Do you know Dudley?” asks the site, which was paid for by the Democratic Governors Association. “Do you see eye-to-eye on the issues that matter most? Take our quick survey and find out.”
The interactive “survey” asks readers to respond to a series of questions and then provides answers designed to put Dudley in a bad light. For example, it points out that Dudley is “still open to [oil and gas] drilling off the cost of Oregon” (old news) that Dudley lived in Washington while playing for the Portland Trail Blazers to avoid paying Oregon income tax (new news), that he “actively campaigned for George Bush who, as you may remember, drove our national and state economy into a ditch” (old news) and that “he’s done everything possible to avoid debating” his Democratic opponent, John Kitzhaber.
Some of the sting was taken out of that last accusation on Friday, when the Dudley campaign announced their guy would be willing to take part in four debates with Kitzhaber this fall. Details still have to be worked out.
The silliest accusation the new site makes is that Dudley – a professional investment advisor in Lake Oswego – “actually wanted to go to work on Wall Street.”
Although Dudley didn’t end up on Wall Street, the site adds, “his firm invests [for] and advises ultra-wealthy clients, while Dudley advocates for huge tax cuts for the wealthy.”
I’m still trying to figure out what to make of that. Financial advisors don’t normally work for poor clients. And attacking the man not because he works on Wall Street but because he supposedly wanted to work on Wall Street is really a stretch.
