Saturday, October 20, 2012
COLUMBUS
Political campaigns often include allegations of one candidate spreading falsehoods about the other.
Sometimes, such complaints are brought before the state’s election commission, though the campaigns involved are careful to call them “false statements.” (More often than not, the penalty for such violations is a slap on the wrist, but that’s a topic for another day.)
The point is that politicians aren’t too quick to call their opponents liars or state bluntly that something is a lie.
Enter Sherrod Brown and Josh Mandel, the incumbent Democratic U.S. senator and his punchy Republican challenger, who last week called each other liar and traded “pants on fire” allegations during the second of three planned debates in their race for the U.S. Senate.
It’s been an ugly campaign between the two. My email inbox fills up daily with press releases chastising one or the other. There’s plenty of mudslinging.
Opportunistic politician
Consider last week’s debate: Brown painted Mandel as an opportunistic politician who has been too busy running for U.S. Senate to attend meetings in his current elected position as state treasurer.
“He doesn’t show up to work in Columbus for his job,” Brown said. “He’s way more concerned about his next job than he is about those auto workers that could have lost their jobs, about those non-union workers at the plastics plant in Akron, about the steel workers in Middletown that make the steel for the Chevy Cruze. He’s way more interested in his next job than he is in doing his job for the people of Ohio.”
He added, “Josh Mandel, as an elected official, has fallen far short on the honesty and integrity quotient.”
Mandel, meanwhile, paints Brown as a career politician, a Washington insider who has been running for office since Richard Nixon was president.
“You’re dead wrong,” Mandel said. “It’s why the Cleveland Plain-Dealer called your attacks on me false, deceiving, dishonest, incorrect, ‘Lie of the Year.’ Senator, you are a liar. You are lying to the people of the state of Ohio, you’re falsely attacking me, and I won’t stand for it.”
In between such vitriol, Brown and Mandel are also making the case on why they are the better choice for U.S. Senate.
Brown will run through a list of accomplishments, including the federal auto bailout that saved thousands of jobs for Ohioans. He’ll point to the state’s decreasing unemployment rates and decreasing medical costs for seniors.
Mandel has a list of plans, too, including a willingness to close overseas military bases. He also is taking a hard stance against future bailouts for Wall Street banks and supports a series of policy changes that he says will drive down health care costs.
In between the jabs and low blows, there’s substance in the rhetoric. So voters get the spectacle of a good knockdown, drag-out political fight, with plenty of information and comments that provide a picture of what each candidate thinks about his opponent and where each candidate stands on different issues.
It doesn’t get much better than that, short of actual fisticuffs.
Marc Kovac is The Vindicator’s Statehouse correspondent. Email him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at OhioCapitalBlog.