Call It A Comeback
Oberweis defends making up family for ads:
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“Three or four days before the end of the campaign to go out and spend time trying to find people to fit those different categories was a lot more difficult than just finding actors.”
I owe Chris Lauzen and John Zahm apologies (Zahm was a volunteer, not employee of Lauzen’s campaign). I figured the lawsuits would start in the primary-probably with Zahm.
Nope. The Oberweis family sues first!
The content of the DCCC piece is not my favorite argument given it was a contractor, but at the same time if you are going to insist you are sending 12 million people back to Mexico in a few months, the irony is wonderful. It’s definitely not lawsuit material. Except, in the 14th.
I knew if I held out, someone would come through in this race….
Essentially the voters think he’s a dick. 49% unfavorable 39% favorable.
If it’s any consolation, Blagojevich is a bigger dick with 74% disapproval.
It’s perhaps one of the weirdest arguments ever made about a nominating process, having more delegates matters less than winning the right states. The apparent claim is that when one wins a state in the primary, that makes you more likely to win it in the general election.
It’s a dumb argument because, well, the general election is a different electorate and so winning a state in a primary doesn’t mean you can carry it in the general election.
Case in point, look at the Survey USA poll of McCain-Obama, McCain-Clinton matchups.
The maps are only a snapshot in time and I’m sure they would change over an election, but Democrats take Ohio in both cases and Obama, who hasn’t even campaigned in Michigan, wins Michigan, Clinton doesn’t. That Obama makes inroads in some deeply red states is what is most interesting to me, while Clinton survives only by taking the safe Democratic states and a few swings.
He also loses New Jersey according to the survey which will only happen in bizarro world after an actual general election campaign just as Clinton isn’t going to lose Oregon and Washington.
Obama, according to the poll loses Pennsylvania and Florida–two places he hasn’t yet spent time in so this is likely to change if he does campaign in both places–or at least Pennsylvania will likely change.
The thing that makes all of this interesting is that Clinton’s only way to win the nomination is to have superdelegates vote against the plurality of the elected delegates. In one case that is reasonable if she creates popular vote margin in the contests, but if Obama wins the most popular votes and the most elected delegates, it’s hard to imagine how superdelegates would justify voting against the Democratic electorate. The only argument to even make that plausible is that Obama cannot win states like Ohio that are swing states–but the polling tells another story.
Jonathan Singer over at MyDD points out that the money the RNCC is throwing at IL-14 is about 1/3 of their cash on hand–well before the accounting irregularities are sorted out. They may not be out of debt yet even.
And if they lose IL-14, the wallets of big donors get harder to crack open.
Howard Wolfson reminds us all that Mark Penn isn’t the only asshole in the Clinton campaign:
“When Senator Obama was confronted with questions over whether he was ready to be Commander-in-Chief and steward of the economy, he chose not to address those questions, but to attack Senator Clinton,” Wolfson said. “I for one do not believe that imitating Ken Starr is the way to win a Democratic primary election for president.”
Wow. It comes on the heels of a Survey USA poll finding Foster ahead by 7 points.
How do you sell yourself to other clients after blowing the former Speaker’s seat?
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It’s clear Jim Oberweis isn’t smart enough to argue his way out of a paper bag, so let’s look at the most recent Trib editorial on the fumbling campaign run by the man who cannot win:
Total fiction. All of it. These people don’t exist. They were created by Oberweis’ campaign, which bought stock photos to use in the ad.
They’re nice-looking folks, although they’re sporting awfully big smiles given that they could be slapped with Foster’s huge tax increases.
Oh, wait, these families don’t exist. They’re fake.
The flier cops to this trickery in itty bitty print at the bottom. “The four examples above are fictional, and any similarity between these characters and any real people is pure coincidence,” it reads.
Pure coincidence? Makes us think any similarity between the Oberweis campaign and the truth is pure coincidence.
He’s done this kind of thing before. In 2006, he ran a TV ad that used fake headlines from several newspapers to trash his Republican opponent for governor, Judy Baar Topinka. The ad had the Tribune masthead above a headline that said: “Investigation into Topinka.” The Tribune didn’t run that headline or those words.
This page endorsed Bill Foster earlier this week. One reason for that decision: Oberweis has shown in four campaigns that he plays fast and loose with the truth.
By the way, using Oberweis’ calculations, the Wadsworths must be paying $34,250 in taxes on their $73,000 income. And that’s before the $8,905 increase.
They really need a new tax accountant.
Oh, that’s right. They’re not real.
This page is closer to Oberweis than Foster on several economic and foreign policy issues. But we watched Oberweis in his races for the U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2004, and for governor in 2006. We’ve watched this race for Congress. His campaign style has consistently been nasty, smug, condescending … and dishonest.
In 2004, he ran an ad in which he hovered over Soldier Field in a helicopter and said 10,000 illegal aliens come to the U.S. each day, “enough to fill Soldier Field every single week.” The number was grossly inflated and the ad smacked of fear-mongering.
In 2006, he ran TV ads that used headlines from the Tribune and other newspapers to attack an opponent. But the headlines were fake. They hadn’t appeared in the newspapers.
This year, Oberweis’ campaign is based on the notion that his opponent is a big-spending liberal. Oberweis’ TV and radio ads quote Foster saying, “There’s nothing in life that you can’t improve by pouring money at it. …”
Foster did say that, at a League of Women Voters debate. But the transcript makes it clear he was talking about the federal government’s “poor efforts” to improve air-traffic-control safety. His conclusion: “This is one example of a place I would look to save taxpayer dollars.”
And Oberweis’ immediate response at the debate? He said: “I find myself in the almost embarrassing position of tending to agree with Bill on some of his comments there.”
The sum impression of Oberweis from four campaigns: He sees public office as an opportunity to pick a fight.
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