All politics is local? Sorry, Tip – nowadays all politics is vocal.
Case in point: the Boston chapter of the Service Employees International Union, which has recently jumped into the 2012 campaign adstravaganza. From Thursday’s Boston Globe:
Union dives into political spending
SEIU had fought corporate outlays on ads
The Service Employees International Union, the politically active labor group whose members include health care workers and janitors, has fought against corporations spending unlimited cash on candidates, warning it would “distort and ultimately delegitimize the electoral process.’’
But the union has now organized its own group that can spend limitless amounts of money to influence elections, and that group is running an ad criticizing Senator Scott Brown.
Said ad, from MassUniting:
The Globe piece points out that “[t]he nonpartisan group factcheck.org said several of the ad’s charges are inaccurate and called it ‘a misleading liberal ad.'”
Right. So what else is new?
Strange little article by Brooks Jackson in fact-check. He rates Brown’s independence by comparing his votes to votes by other Republican senators, which seems arbitrary to me. The result is something like Frank Deford’s famous description of his own reputation as a sportswriter.
That’s the usual yardstick. Anything that might be better?
Pretty much anything would be better. Maybe a sample over a longer period of time, like 5 or 10 years, which might be a large enough sample size to mean something statistically. Maybe measured against the independence of Senators in both parties. Maybe measured against Brown’s own record of independence when he was a State Senator. Maybe measured against the record of his predecessor in the Senate
The point is that you can measure independence in any number of ways–or rather, given the number of different ways to frame the question (and the games that are routinely played with recorded votes) to claim that you have the last word on what independence means is arbirtrary. Brown seems to cross party lines more than Sens. Shelby and Kyle –so what? How is his record compared to the record of Chuck Percy?. To accuse the SEIU of being misleading because they have a different, higher standard for independence is deceptive itself.
Interesting stuff, Bob. Want I should cc: Brooks Jackson?
Sure, although Brook Alvarez would be my first choice.