In case anyone hasn’t yet heard, the Arizona Democratic
Party is spending thousands of dollars to promote Libertarian candidate Nick
Coons’ campaign in Congressional District 5. You know that a political race is
getting interesting, or that somebody’s really desperate, when a political
party starts promoting an opposition candidate. I think this may be the best
story of the 2010 campaign. Strange bedfellows indeed.
This week has seen three different mailers (and counting) from
the Arizona Democratic Party purporting to attack Nick Coons for his opposition
to Obama’s political agenda. In particular, his opposition to Obama’s health
care power grab. Are the Democrats unaware of the widespread opposition to
Obamacare? Of course not. Attacking Coons in this fashion is simply their
desperate attempt to siphon votes away from Republican David Schweikert.
Equally interesting is a mailer sent out by a mystery group out
of Tucson attacking
David Schweikert’s fiscal profligacy compared to Coons’ support for reducing
the Federal deficit. Unlike the Democratic Party’s mailers, this piece is a
more overt attempt at leading voters from Schweikert to Coons. The major
problem with it is that the mailer doesn’t list who mailed it out, except for
the “AJM 85713” in the mailing indicia. This may run afoul of campaign
disclosure laws; although surely nothing will be done about it.
In any event, the overriding aspect of the CD5 race is the
fact that it has been run almost entirely by the Parties, rather than the
candidates. I suspect that this election may well break records for Republican
and Democratic Parties’ expenditures in support of their candidates. That is to
say, attacking opposition candidates. There is a good reason for this; although
I doubt that it has been noted by the lamestream media. This year the US government
conducted a census. Next year the political party that controls the US House of
Representatives will pay homage to
Elbridge Gerry and
redraw congressional districts to its advantage based on the results of that
census.
So you better believe that there will be no claim too
outlandish to go into a campaign mailer. And promoting Libertarian Nick Coons
is to be expected from a party with candidate as lackluster as Harry Mitchell.
In my days as a Libertarian activist it was fairly common
for Republicans to try and persuade us not to run a candidate against them. (It
makes them look bad when there’s a candidate in their race who really does
oppose big government.) Why, I remember a little meeting in a coffee shop in
Globe… oh, never mind that. The point is we’ve now evolved to the point where
the major parties have stolen enough money that they can use a portion of it to
promote Libertarians if they feel it is to their advantage.
The pertinent question is - Would they do so if they felt
the Libertarian Party was truly a threat to their leviathan government?
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