By Dave Steves
Jeff Merkley is running this ad, his first attacking fellow Democratic Senate candidate Steve Novick.
The ad pulls nine words out of four blog entries Novick wrote in 2005 and 2006 in which he criticized (or, as the Merkley camp prefers, “insulted") Hillary Clinton, Darlene Hooley, and Barack Obama (here and here).
Novick campaign manager Jake Wiegler called the ad “pathetic” and accused the Merkley camp of trying to “manufacture division” among Democrats by taking a few words out of context of the critiques his candidate authored. Merkley spokesman Matt Canter disputes that it’s a negative ad and says “Steve started it” when he sent to a TV station an ad critical of Merkley, which ran once on an early morning newcast.
It is worth noting the context of some of these comments highlighted in the Merkley attack ad. If you click on the links and read through the comments, you’ll see that Novick started some fairly engaged dialague among fellow progressives about policy and election issues, but hardly stirred up the kind of outrage Merkley is trying to whip up.
--When Novick called Clinton a “coward” and a “traitress,” (the full sentence: “And if Hillary Clinton is a coward on the war, and a traitress on the First Amendment, why should we expect anything else when it comes to global warming?"), it was in a blog entry making the case for Al Gore to run for president. It provoked a thoughtful exchange of comments, including general agreement with Novick from two people who went on to work for Merkley’s campaign—the blog’s (BlueOregon) founder, Kari Chisholm, and Carla Axtman. Nobody took exception with the coward or traitress lines.
--His riff on Hooley’s support for repealing the inheritance tax ("Darlene Hooley, last I checked, still supports estate tax repeal and peddles the ‘family farms’ lie.") came in a blog entry that was really a valentine to Sen. Ron Wyden for opposing the estate-tax repeal—not a Hooley critique. The Hooley comment, by the way, drew not one rebuke in the 15 comments made by other bloggers.
--Novick’s first crack against Obama highlighted in the Merkley ad ("Obama gives me nothing to like very much and one thing to intensely dislike.") was in an entry puffing up John Edwards’ presidential candidacy and contrasting him against Obama—including the latter’s blanket endorsement in his Web site of new weapons systems. In the blogger-reaction department from the comments to the original Novick entry, one drew a mix of agreement and exception-taking to the Obama criticism.
--The other Obama line that Merkley’s ad takes exception to ("Doesn’t this prove that Obama is just another captive-of-special-interests fraud who doesn’t really care about global warming and doesn’t deserve to be hailed as some great Kenya-Kansas hope?) was part of a set of questions Novick was offering up for fellow bloggers to pose to Congressman Earl Blumenauer, who is Obama’s Oregon chairman. Novick’s point apparently wasn’t simply to call a politician names but to call Obama out for his support for the corn ethanol industry, which has been under fire as an environmentally costly form of biofuel. Again, at the time many of Novick’s fellow bloggers offered plenty of attaboys from his fellow bloggers, but no outrage at the hard verbal shot against a future presidential candidate (whom Novick now endorses).
Novick himself sounded amused by Merkley’s latest on-the-air strategy: “Apparently for Jeff Merkley, the politics of hope and change consist of searching the Internet for year-and-a-half-old blog posts and putting them on television.”
