It just keeps getting better. It appears that Colorado senate candidate Bob Schaffer (R) is pursuing a two track strategy for defusing the controversy over his efforts to bring the Mariana Islands immigration program to mainland America. As we noted before, on the one hand, he is angrily lashing out at the news organizations reporting on the story. At the same, he is craftily rebranding himself as a hard-charging anti-sweatshop crusader.
Schaffer apparently talked to Lynn Bartels of the Rocky Mountain News and …
Former congressman Bob Schaffer says the night he landed in Saipan to review working conditions in the U.S. territory, he demanded an immediate tour of a garment factory he heard had an unsavory reputation.
A welcoming committee wanted to take Schaffer to his hotel, he said, but he prevailed. He said he found women working in a “sweatshop,” and demanded leaders of the Northern Mariana Islands investigate.
“I was told that shortly after I left (the Marianas) that the factory was shut down,” he said Friday, stressing he never verified the information.
Now, this is a little different from what Schaffer said at the time …
“There were some examples of problems that we found, and we raised those with the equivalent of the attorney general,” Schaffer said of his visit. But in many others, “the workers were smiling; they were happy.”
Seems to have changed a bit in the retelling. And it’s worth reading the rest of the RMN piece to get a flavor of Schaffer Marianas 2.0. But it still doesn’t quite make sense of why Schaffer kept carrying the water of the sweatshop owners in Congress and beating up on the folks who were trying to rein in the abuses (something we’ll have more for you about next week.)
