Anatomy Of A Deceptive Election Ad: Meet Republican Rubber Stamp Gordon Smith

A few days ago when we looked at Chris Shays' deceitful TV ad attempting to tie himself to Barack Obama's popularity in Connecticut, we also noted how Shays' had taken a cue from Oregon rubber stamp Gordon Smith who had already done a similar TV ad and subsequently quit as McCain's Oregon campaign chairman. Rasmussen's most recent August polling shows Obama beating McCain by 10 points.

Smith is desperate to do eveything he can to appear to distance himself from the Republican Party and from the party's radical right agenda. He's keeping away from the GOP HateFest in St Paul, hoping Oregon voters will forget he's part of the much-loathed Republican Party. But he still refuses-- as does Shays-- to give back the thousands and thousands of dollars he has received from reactionary swiftboat financier, one of the earth's worst polluters and most corrupt men, billionaire Harold Simmons of Dallas. Simmons will give whatever it takes to keep Smith in office-- even as he spends millions on smearing Barack Obama, the same way he did in 2004 to John Kerry. But forget for a moment that Harold Simmons has been buying Gordon Smith's votes for years and let's just look at Smith's voting record on Iraq, the subject of his new ad (below).

Smith wants Oregon voters to know he doesn't support Bush and the radical Neocon agenda on Iraq. Yet he still claims to support McCain for president, whose entire rason d'etre for being in the race is to fulfill that agenda and stay the course. McCain says Smith is still part of his "kitchen cabinet" and in the past-- before he saw the polling on how much Oregionians disagree with McCain's ideas about continuing the occupation of Iraq, he said. "President Bush has set our country on the course of recovery at home and strength abroad. We are safer today because this president has had the backbone to follow terrorism where terrorists are and go after them, and they have failed to strike us again on our own shores since 9-11… President Bush represents economic recovery and American leadership."

When we asked Jeff Merkley, the progressive, anti-war Democrat who's taking Smith on this year, why Smith was trying to portray himself as a moderate and independent and make believe he opposed the war, he had an interesting perspective: "Smith had a responsibility to investigate the Iraq threat and failed. Then he criticized people like me who opposed the war from the beginning. Smith says he read a book in July of 2006 that made him change his mind about the war. But after changing his mind Smith did nothing about it. Imagine, a U.S. Senator decided the Iraq war was wrong and did nothing about it for seven months. Not until six of his Republican colleagues lost reelection in 2006 did Smith decide to speak out and, even then, refused to take a tough stance to bring our sons and daughters home. America needs leaders who believe in what they fight for and will fight for what they believe in. Some times that is politically inconvenient, but that is what real leadership is all about."

That's why Blue America has been so enthusiastic in its endorsement of Jeff. Please consider donating what you can to his campaign at the Blue America ActBlue page.

Smith has participated in 49 roll call votes regarding Iraq since he enthusiastically supported the Bsh-Cheney position of the use of force 6 times on October 10 and 11, 2002. He was a 100% war hawk at the time. He claims he's changed. Has he? Well, he rubber stamped every single Bush-Cheney initiative in Iraq (19 roll calls) until he finally found something non-binding and innocuous to oppose in June, 2004. And then it was back to the good ole Smith rubber stamp shuffle for another year when another innocuous procedural vote came up that he could safely "support"-- along with even far right Republican kooks and warmongers like George Allen (R-VA), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Ted Stevens (R-AK), Norm Coleman (R-MN), John Sununu (R-NH), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)... even his pal McCain... so not exactly a profile in courage. For the rest of 2005, all of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, when he started remembering he would soon have to face Oregon voters again, he never wavered from his rubber stamp support for the Bush Cheney Iraq agenda-- he was 100% in the bag. In March, 2007 there was a non-binding resolution and some assbackwards Neocon joke that he voted with the Democrats on, neirther being anything more than symbolic. And then the opinion polls of Oregon voters started coming in and Smith noticed his job approval rating was predicting a defeat in 2008. (October, 2007 and May, 2008) At that point he started flip flopping around, voting with Bush-Cheney-McCain and the radical right on some issues and against Bush-Cheney-McCain on other issues. Still, when the tough, hardcore votes come up-- the ones that would actually end the war, like Russ Feingold's amendment to redeploy U.S. forces in September, 2007, Smith's "no" vote cancelled out Wyden's "yes" vote. And on July 9, 2008, Smith lined up with the right-wing of his party to oppose Arlen Spector (R-PA) who offered an amendment to the FISA bill that would not have permitted retroactive immunity for criminal telecom executives (many of whom had "donated" to Smith's career), again cancelling out Wyden's vote. It might be worth noting that when you discount senators running for president , Gordon Smith was the 6th biggest recipient of "donations" from those telecom giants he voted to grant retroactive immunity. If that isn't out and out bribery, I don't know what is. They've lavished $169,710 on him in his political career.) Anyway, watch his deceptive ad and then think about it... does a senator who rubber stamps Bush for 5 years, then changes his positions a little after seeing some polls showing voters are angry merit re-eelection?