So, GOP Senate candidate John Spencer has rolled out his ad accusing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of aiding Osama by opposing NSA wiretaps.
The ad, which pretty blatantly distorts Clinton’s position (She voted "no" on a party-line test vote of the USA Patriot Act and voted "yes’ when privacy safeguards were inserted) seems to have been hastily thrown together. Fascist, for example, is spelled "facist."
Spencer reportedly spent a mere $25,000 to broadcast it briefly in the city's northern burbs, but the target audience was just as likely Fox News and the right-wing talk-show types who have seized on it as "news."
So why did he bother? One possible take:....
Glenn Thrush
Spencer’s locked in a nasty preliminary bout with K.T. McFarland, a moderate who looks positively liberal compared to him. So what’s the harm in positioning yourself as the true anti-Hillary candidate – especially if all you have to risk is $25k and accusations you’re descending into Ann Coulter territory?
Comments (4)
Sure made Spencer look like a fool. That misspelling cost him any traction from it. Instead it made his campaign look junior varsity in the extreme.
Spencer's a jerk Does this really surprise anybody?
Maybe on the misspelling he was combining two thoughts: Faso and Facist, thus Fascist. Well, that's not really fair. John Faso is a good gut, and he was an effective assemblyman. Of course, that was his high water point.
In case you didn't get the irony of my last post (since it wasn't clear), it is spelled "fascist." And it is a term we throw around too loosely.
Albany Times Union edtorial today. Ouch!
How low can you go?
Republican Senate candidate John Spencer has taken to associating Hillary Clinton and Osama bin Laden
First published: Friday, August 18, 2006
We're not supposed to be in the business of advising political candidates. Only in the case of John Spencer and his torturously uphill campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by Hillary Rodham Clinton, we can't resist.
Mr. Spencer, bite your tongue. Stop embarrassing yourself. New York's 3.2 million enrolled Republicans are entitled to have a serious candidate on the party's ticket this fall.
How can any candidate expect to be taken seriously, at least by anyone beyond like-minded zealots, when he puts an ad on TV that tries to make a connection between Mrs. Clinton and Osama bin Laden? This is even worse than last week's debacle of a debate with his Republican rival, Kathleen Troia McFarland.
The finished product is so offensive that it's tempting to overlook how faulty Mr. Spencer's reasoning is in coming to such a conclusion. Try to follow along.
"Senator Hillary Clinton opposed the Patriot Act and the NSA program that helped stop another 9/11. She'd leave us vulnerable," the ad's narrator says. Say what?
Oh, and with images of newspaper headlines about a now-foiled terrorist plot against U.S.-bound passenger flights on the screen, bin Laden's photo pops up next to Mrs. Clinton's.
How wrong could one man be?
Mrs. Clinton has actually supported the Patriot Act and its enormous expansion of government powers, at the expense of civil liberties, in the fight against terrorism. She voted for the original law, which was rushed into passage after the Sept. 11 attacks. She voted for it again last year, too, after insisting upon some modest restrictions on the government's otherwise increased powers to investigate potential terrorism suspects.
It is true that Mrs. Clinton has been quite critical of the Bush administration using the National Security Agency to engage in domestic spying without warrants from judges. She's hardly alone. A federal judge ruled Thursday that wiretaps without warrants are unconstitutional.
Earlier this summer, though, Mrs. Clinton spoke out in favor of giving any president the available technology to legally keep tabs on potential terrorists.
She's a moderate, in other words, and quite a politically deft one. It's not that Mrs. Clinton has no positions on national security issues, as Mr. Spencer charges in a fundraising letter he sent out this week. They're simply more nuanced positions than his.
And that's apparently very frustrating for Mr. Spencer -- to the point where he'll ambush not only his opponent but the truth as well. It would be so much easier to run against Mrs. Clinton if she were genuinely as far to the left as Mr. Spencer is to the right.
"I'm John Spencer, and I approved this message because I won't play politics with our security," his ad concludes.
Mr. Spencer, how can you say that with a straight face.