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It is always a risky proposition in a campaign to excessively exaggerate an opponent's flaws or too fawningly promote one's own candidate. Yes, the benefit of getting away with it can be high. But, the risk of getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar is not small.
Within the last week the Gregoire campaign has been caught stretching the truth, in excess even for a political campaign.
1) David Postman dissected a recent Gregoire radio ad and found it wanting on two assertions. In the case of both Roe. v. Wade and global warming, the accusations in Gregoire's ad were flawed, or even flat false.
2) The Rossi campaign caught the Gregoire campaign in doublespeak in a July 9th campaign blog post on the environment (yes, you have to scroll down to find it because the Gregoire campaign doesn't appear to believe in permalinks):
The blog post says, "Republican Dino Rossi would reverse our progress in fighting climate change. His grand idea to cut greenhouse gas emissions? Build more roads. That's right. According to Republican Dino Rossi, more roads and more cars equal less greenhouse gas emissions."
Yet the road projects that Christine Gregoire refers to are the same road projects that she has claimed to support.
Oops.
Now, neither of these "catches" are nothing more than political chatter at the present time, given the state of the race and the time left until November. Yet, these are the sort of fumbles that can have much more troublesome consequences in September and October. Then is not the time to have a major TV ad or other such campaign effort torn apart by critics for blatant factual errors.
Indeed, this blogger has a tale to tell about just such a late in the campaign blunder by Team Gregoire in 2004, in which I played a modest role, that will be told later this month. Suffice it to say, it's something campaigns ought to be careful about, and Gregoire's campaign is already running risks.
Cross-posted at Sound Politics.
