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December 13, 2007

AuCoin echoes GOP frame, undermines Novick's message

Recently over at his blog, Les Aucoin (the biggest endorser so far of Steve Novick’s fledgling campaign for the Dem nomination for U.S. Senate), posted his single issue list of why he’s backing Novick for the job.

AuCoin trotted out the oft-cited and more-oft-debunked saw of the 2003 Oregon House Resolution 2, a GOP-framed mess that offered support for U.S. troops laying their lives on the line for the Bush Administration’s Iraq Fiasco. Merkley voted "yes" on the nonbinding resolution and then stood up and gave a speech smacking down the Bush team’s war while refusing to shrug off the importance of backing our men and women in uniform.

Merkley and others who gave similar speeches are the only legislators who actually avoided the GOP trap. By refusing to sit down and quietly cast a vote, Merkley blew the lid off of the deal with a speech exposing its true colors.

Novick and his surrogates have railed to anyone who would listen that Merkley doesn’t deserve to run against Smith because he alledgedly wasn't smart enough to spot and avoid the GOP trap, and has thus proven in their minds his inability to stand up to the Iraq/Iran War hawks. AuCoin is unfortunately no exception. The open question is whether they know better and are banking on Joe Oregonian not being bright enough to see through it or they really don't understand how a standard GOP trap actually works. Generously assuming the later, there will be a brief Primer on how this sort of GOP trap operates, complete with examples from actual rightwing sites.

Even worse, AuCoin’s post is polluted with factual errors.

Case in point:

Steve saw through the cynical Republican resolution in the 2005 session of the Oregon Legislature that simultaneously praised "President George Bush’s courage" in launching a first strike war against Iraq and supported "our troops."

The vote in question was in 2003, not 2005. And while Steve Novick might have voted differently than Jeff Merkley, we’ll never know. Steve has never served in any elected capacity. But it’s clear from the way Novick has talked about this issue that he hasn’t seen through anything. He’s bought into the GOP frame and tried to hammer Merkley over the head with it.

More factual problems with AuCoin’s post:

Or, better, as House Minority Leader, Jeff could have out-maneuvered Republicans by engineering a Democratic Minority Report supporting the troops without glorifying Bush. Minority Reports are voted on before the bills to which they are attached; thus, it would have separated the issues, allowed Democrats to support the troops, and then oppose Bush on the war. It didn’t happen. This reveals a key difference between the Democratic candidates as we look for someone to effectively fight the neo-conservative putsch that threatens us.

Jeff Merkley wasn’t House Minority Leader in 2003. That job belonged to Deborah Kafoury. Furthermore, a Democratic Minority Report on the issue would have been sent out from the House Rules Committee and the Minority Leader didn’t serve on that committee that year. Maybe she could have pushed it through one of the members, but that’s a question for her, not Jeff Merkley.

Ironically, Kafoury has endorsed Novick. Will AuCoin be sitting Kafoury down at the next Novick holiday gathering and dressing her down for her lack of leadership on HR2? Not likely.

Novick has Kafoury listed on his site as the former House Democratic Leader. He obviously knows that she was the Minority Leader. It seems odd that Novick’s most famous backer would write something like this and be so off-message for the campaign. Or did the campaign look this piece over and decide that being factually correct just isn’t all that important?

Neither is particularly impressive. Especially given Novick’s constant talk of Gordon Smith’s "consumate politician" status, it’s difficult to see how Novick could allow his most visible statewide surrogate to be so careless.

Update: Les AuCoin indicates in comments to his post that he's going to correct the myriad factual inaccuracies in it. You can see the cached pre-correction version of his post here.

Posted by Kevin at December 13, 2007 08:15 AM