I’ve been seeing TV ads in the last couple of days that accuse Utah Representative Jim Matheson — the only Utah Democrat currently serving at a national level — of being a flaming liberal in the Ted Kennedy mold. However, an article in today’s Tribune indicates that Matheson has more often than not sided with House Republicans in his voting. Interesting…
I guess some people think that being “a little bit liberal” is kind of like being “a little bit pregnant.”
Oct122004
Those ads slay me. Especially the ones where John Swallow claims that “Matheson has voted with the Democrat party 75% of the time! And supports Kerry and Edwards!!” No WAY! You’d think he was a… a DEMOCRAT!
It just proves to me that Swallow can’t find any real dirt on Matheson.
Exactly.
What slays me about those ads is how they misrepresent what’s actually gone on over the last couple of years. Most of Matheson’s votes over the past two years have actually tended to support Republican-sponsored and/or favored bills. In many of those cases, it just so happened that the Democrats in general were favoring those bills also, so I suppose that, while it’s technically true that Matheson was voting with the Democrats, he was also supporting the very things that J. Swallow himself would (presumably) support. So what’s the harm?
My concern is that a whole lot of people out there just eat up TV ads with their exaggerations, distortions and out-of-context sound bytes and never bother to do any reading…