tough, but casual. They call him wrangler. They look like campaign ads, they smell like campaign ads, and they sure as hell sound like campaign ads. But Jeff Merkley insists they’re not campaign ads.
The TV spots started airing early this month. In the first of them, Merkley talks about how America has mistreated veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the next, he touts the record of the Oregon Legislature, and himself as House speaker, in toughening laws against meth and child sexual abusers. In the third, he attacks wasteful spending in Washington and brags about how, as a legislator, he worked to “put the middle class first.”
The ads aren’t being funded by the Merkley campaign; the Democratic Party of Oregon is paying for them, using money from the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. And that’s where the problem is.
Federal law limits the amount of campaign money a US Senate candidate can receive from his state and national party to $485,200. Merkley had already gotten more than $386,000 from the party before the first of the ads was released. That’s why the Merkley ads prompted Republican Gordon Smith’s campaign to file a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission.
But the ads are perfectly kosher, Merkley and the DPO maintain, because of a loophole in the law that allows additional spending on “issue ads” – ads that discuss specific issues rather than pushing an individual candidate. Since the ads don’t say that Merkley is a candidate for the Senate they’re legally permitted, the argument goes.
That argument is so transparently phony that any reasonably intelligent six-year-old could see through it. Although the ads don’t mention Merkley’s candidacy or knock his opponent, they put Merkley’s face on the TV screens of millions of Oregonians and describe what a swell guy he is and what great things he’s done in Oregon – and, by clear implication, what great things he’d do in Washington.
“There’s no legal question here,” Merkley has said. “These ads are completely about the issues – issues that are very important to this country.” Apparently we’re supposed to think it’s pure coincidence that these very important issues are being discussed in TV ads just a few months before a senatorial election.
The use of issue ads to get around the spending limit and push a candidate isn’t new. But the Democrats have gone a big step further by having the candidate himself appear in the ads and talk up his own achievements. The experts are divided on whether the Democrats have technically crossed the line; the FEC, regrettably, is not expected to rule on Smith’s complaint until after the election.
Maybe the dust-up over the Smith-Merkley race will get the FEC to close the loophole for issue ads, or at least clarify how broad it is. Meanwhile, although Merkley and the DPO are calling the Smith campaign “desperate” for complaining to the FEC, they’re the ones who are looking desperate – and sleazy. Here’s a BOOT for both of them.
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2008.
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Letâ ™s just be crystal clear here. Gordon Smith is the only candidate in the Senate race to have been fined by the FEC for violating campaign finance law.
‘Yawl used to be a pretty progressive publication. These days you’re no different that those advertisement rags the Bullshiten used to print and throw away on Wednesdays.
Bears, you musta stayed too late at the brewpub last night or something. We’ve BOOTed Republicans about 50 times for every time we’ve BOOTed a Democrat.
Just another example of why so-called ‘campaign reform’ legislation is so ineffective. All such laws are written with the intention of giving the appearance of action on an issue some people think is making government a system of governance by special interests. All such laws seem to be laced throughout with loopholes that allow business as usual by both parties and their supporters. The supreme court has continued to support the concepts of corporations as individuals and money as free speech.
Better to erase all such scofflaws from the books and focus on real issues like security, energy, and the economy, rather than which party is more corrupt because they have figured out how to ‘bend’ rules written to be bendable in the first place.
Such ‘character’ arguments take away from the issues we should be concerned about. I can distract my granddaughter with shiny things, too.
I haven’t been to The Pub, B, in MONTHS. To expensive for us common folk, a tourerist trap, no longer the local’s favorite. And I’ve been pretty durned busy cleaning up after fools who visit porn sites, click on pop-ups, open e-mails from strangers… could be a banner year for my startup.
Bears, I agree there are too damn many tourists at the pub, especially in the evenings. The beer isn’t that great that it’s worth fighting your way through a crowd to get to the bar. At least at my age it’s not.
BTW I went to the new Deschutes Brewery pub in Portland’s Pearl District a couple weeks ago while in town to visit my daughter. Very big, very swanky and very expensive — $5 a pint! Yikes! But I guess they’ve got a pretty big nut to cover.
EYah, I’ve visited the new pub a couple of times, wrote a favorable revue, but it’s not exactly what we’ve come to know and love. I like it though, if only for it’s proximity to Powell’s Books 😉
HBM states: “We’ve BOOTed Republicans about 50 times for every time we’ve BOOTed a Democrat.”
Fair and balanced? At last, HBM has publicly admitted the obvious. No rational person would view that 50 to 1 statistic as representative of anything remotely akin to a centered reaction to any truthful observation of real world politic. That kind of casual, off hand, flippant admission of obvious bias and the deliberate distortions of truth necessary to accomplish it; what HBM has declared (by default) to clearly be utter propaganda, has a foul odor reminiscent of something approaching low smut.
Unfortunately, HBM and The Source do not possess a convincing political argument based on the intellectual merits of their position…If they had one, they would surely use it…so now, they admittedly resort to using smear and demonizing to make their weak illegitimate point.
Glad you came out of the shed, left wing troll, but the powerful odor of mendacity clings to you like clots of rotting flesh.
Because you asked: The anger comes from dealing with dishonest low life who view the truth, common decency, morality and ethics as something vile to be shunned.
Jerard: We are a progressive publication (just as The Bulletin is a conservative Republican publication) and we make no secret of it. The BOOT is an expression of opinion. (That’s why it appears under “OPINION” — duh!)
BTW your flamboyant vocabulary and the style of your rhetoric (lots of colorful insults, no substance) are very familiar; I strongly suspect you are one right-wing troll posting under a number of aliases. How intellectually dishonest is that?