The front-running GOP candidate for Tom DeLay’s old House seat is accusing Democrats of dirty tricks — but a look at a similar tactic in Pennsylvania, apparently by her own party, shows how a dirty trick is really done.
The candidate, Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, is upset about a mailer the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently spent $50,000 to send to voters in her district, TX-22 — but not because the mailer attacks her. The DCCC targets another Don Richardson, another GOP candidate who’s trailing badly in polls. In its mailer, the DCCC attacks him for being “too conservative” for the district.
The DCCC won’t discuss its strategy here, but it’s pretty transparent: They’re hoping to boost Richardson’s name recognition and help him peel votes away from Sekula-Gibbs, who is the GOP-endorsed nominee. (DeLay’s botched late resignation, you might remember, has left Republicans without a candidate on the ballot — so Sekula-Gibbs, the GOP’s endorsed write-in nominee, has been forced to compete with Richardson and Libertarian Bob Smithers for every conservative voter she can get.) Here’s the mailer (click to enlarge):
I asked Brooks Jackson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org to compare this arguably misleading mailer with another one we’ve written a lot about recently: the “Progressive Policy Council” mailer, sent out by a Republican front group in the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race. That mailer, purporting to be from a non-existent liberal group, attacked both the Republican and Democratic Senate candidate for being too conservative on issues like gay marriage and stem cell research. As we revealed, public records show that a Republican operative is connected to the group.
Jackson’s answer: it’s not even close. “There’s no deception in the DCCC mailing in Texas, while the Pennsylvaina mailer falsely claims to be from a ‘progressive’ organization,” he told me. “The Pennsylvania mailing deceives voters about the motives of the sender,” while “the Texas mailing. . . is up front about coming from Democrats.”
Update: We’ve added a 2nd version of the mailer that’s gone out to voters to our document collection, courtesy of the Houston Chronicle.
