I really hate this political advertisement.

[rax]

If you're not interested in the politics of the current Massachusetts special election for Senate, and in particular interested in my complaining about the problems with a particular Coakley ad, you can safely skip this one.

So, there's this special election happening this coming Tuesday in MA, with three candidates running:

• Martha Coakley, current state Attorney General, Democrat;
• Scott Brown, current state senator, Republican;
• Joe Kennedy, no current office, Independent/Libertarian/self-advertised "Tea Party Candidate."

Until recently, everyone (including me) assumed Coakley was just going to walk away with it; I wasn't thrilled with this, as I preferred Mike Capuano in the primaries, but even though I'm not terribly fond of her she is likely to vote the way I would want her to vote on most things. Lately Brown has been picking up a lot of steam, and Coakley has started having to actually campaign; as far as I can tell, she's doing an abominable job of it. Witness this flier:



So, this is pretty bad. First of all, this entire side of the flyer --- and this is an 8.5 by 11 flyer --- says nothing positive at all. It's a picture of a sick-looking plant, and a badly photoshopped montage of Republicans. It doesn't even tell me anything specific about Scott Brown, other than that he apparently "is BUSH." Now, there are plenty of legitimate things to criticize about Scott Brown, but I don't vote against candidates because they are poorly photoshopped, it usually takes more than that. Hopefully, I thought, the back would actually explain to me what attributes Scott Brown has that I won't like other than "we put him next to George Bush using technology." Maybe, heavens forfend, it would even tell me something positive about Martha Coakley instead. Here's what we get:



Aside from "Coakley's staff got some fonts for Christmas that they really wanted to try out," this tells us that Coakley's campaign, based on some citations (at least there are citations!), believes that Scott Brown and George W. Bush have the same position on three issues. I'm realy pissed, because for the first two, I'm not entirely sure what they even mean:

• "Repeal taxbreaks for companies that ship U.S. jobs overseas." What exactly constitutes a U.S. job? What tax breaks are these? Is this a particular piece of legislation? There are so many things that this could mean, some of which I'm probably in favor of, and some of which I'm probably not. I can't say, without knowing, and the source for this is the UMass Republican Club Newsletter of Fall 2008. [0] Great! There's a source I can easily check! In fact, it turns out that the newsletter of Fall/Winter 2008 is actually the most recent one they've done, and you can download it in PDF format by clicking this link I just put here for you. Here's the paragraph I think they're basing this assertion on:

"The State Senator also blasted the Patrick administration's plan to tax earnings that corporations with
offices in Massachusetts make outside the United States. This so called “closing corporate loopholes,”
he said, would make Massachusetts a far less viable place to do business and would likely result in
many businesses with offices in Massachusetts relocating to other states or to foreign countries.
Brown gave the example of Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Corporation, which has a bottling plant in
Needham: under the Patrick administration's plan, Coca-Cola would be required to pay a
Massachusetts tax on its international earnings simply because they have an office in Massachusetts.
This issue has been especially pressing for Senator Brown because the Needham Coca-Cola bottling
plant is one of the largest employers in his senatorial district and has begun to consider moving over
the border to Rhode Island to avoid this superfluous new tax while still remaining close enough to
Boston to not damage its distribution business. "

If you read through this publication, it's, uh, not the sort of thing I'd really want to cite to make a convincing political argument. It's a newsletter for a bunch of conservative college students, two whole pages of which are taken up with "GOD BLESS AMERICA" iconography. I find it more interesting that Scott Brown personally donates to their school Republican club than that they printed something about his opinions. The other thing that they cite here is a roll call vote on H. 4904, which does appear to actually change the way that Massachusetts calculates combined reporting when there's a Massachusetts company doing business in multiple locations or with a partner company in another state or country? Or something? This is totally beyond my legalese and financial skills, but here's a late draft version of the bill if you want to take a look. It's unclear to me that the statement the Coakley campaign here makes is actually justified.

• "Crackdown on Wall Street abuses that led to financial meltdown." OK, how? I am skeptical that Scott Brown --- or even George W. Bush, as popular it is to just assume he's wrong about everything [1] --- actually desires to change nothing about the financial system. Most likely, what's different here is how they would like to approach it. They cite a radio show interview, which I was able to find a transcript of. Here's what he says: "Pulling back on the financial [regulations], I think if you do too much too soon, it doesn’t have a chance to catch up and see if we can work out of this ourselves through free enterprise, through private enterprise, intervention and creativity. So I’m all in favor of just holding back for a little bit and letting private enterprise try to get us out of this mess." Now, I don't necessarily agree with this, but one of the things he listed there was "intervention." Coakley doesn't tell me, with this flyer, what she means by a crackdown. She just says, in a larger and bolder and slightly narrower font, "YES." Her issues page on the topic is a little more specific, but it still doesn't say what policies she supports: "She will work with the business and financial communities as well as other stakeholders to develop and implement tough but fair regulatory reforms to prevent another economic failure and to give the government the necessary tools to protect investors, consumers, and the market in the future." OK, sure.

• "Extend huge tax breaks to richest 1%." This one bothers me less, although I'm still curious what constitutes a "huge" tax break and I wish there were more detail --- and mostly it bothers me less because I remember reading a bunch of articles on different tax policies a year or two ago, not because it's actually all that much more specific. It's another emotional appeal, it's just that "tax the fuck out of the rich" is an emotional appeal that works pretty well on me. The citation is "AP 12/10/09, Boston Globe 12/16/09, Boston Globe 12/30/09" which doesn't tell me where to find the articles, and that's also annoying. It's pretty likely there are specific things that Scott Brown said here that I would disagree with strongly, but all I get is "Supports," nothing really differentiating.

Lest you think I've started supporting Scott Brown, there are plenty of things he's actually said to disagree with and to make me vote for Coakley instead. [2] Here are some things from his issues page:

• "America is a great country but we also have some challenges that we need to solve if we're going to remain the world's superpower." Oh my god no. I do not want a senator who thinks of us as "the world's superpower." I'm very philosophically opposed to this. I mean, fat lot of good that does anyone, but I am.
• "I am a free enterprise advocate who believes that lower taxes can encourage economic growth. Raising taxes stifles growth, weakens the economy and puts more people out of work." Yeah, because that worked so well. As far as I can tell, the actual answer to the question of "Do lower taxes encourage economic growth or do higher taxes encourage economic growth?" is "Oh my god it's not a binary it's an incredibly complicated system please stop turning everything into sound bites you are making the universe more stupid." Coakley has a bunch of text on the economy, and while honestly I'm not versed enough to judge whether or not she's correct about everything, there's some concrete stuff in there like foreclosure relief and keeping track of empty houses that's much more compelling to me than "lower taxes."
• "I oppose a national cap and trade program because of the higher costs that families and businesses would incur." I disagree with this, but he's actually way better on the environment than I would have expected.
• "I believe there are some crimes that are so heinous that they deserve capital punishment. Our Government should have the ability to impose the death penalty in cases where it is justified." I disagree, and so does Coakley. (Whose stance on other crime-related matters I don't like, but I don't expect Brown to be better from what I've read.)
• "I believe government has the responsibility to regulate in this area and I support parental consent and notification requirements and I oppose partial birth abortion. I also believe there are people of good will on both sides of the issue and we ought to work together to support and promote adoption as an alternative to abortion." Disagree strongly with the first sentence, it's nice to see the second one in a Republican campaign, nice to see is different from "would vote for." (Of course, there's no guarantee he wouldn't go and pull a Mitt Romney on us.)
• "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. States should be free to make their own laws in this area, so long as they reflect the people's will as expressed through them directly, or as expressed through their elected representatives." I'd love to see this sort of statement compared to every judicial decision that might not have passed a popular vote at the time. "So you're saying that Brown v. Board of Education was wrong?"

I wish Coakley's flier had addressed these issues using his actual words, delineating real differences between them, rather than the dreck her campaign sent out instead. I hope that anyone in Massachusetts who read this far found this useful in terms of deciding to go and vote on Tuesday --- and of course I encourage you to vote for Coakley despite the problems with her campaign, but it's your ballot. In general, this election makes me wonder "Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?"

[0] I go to UMass. I'm surprised there are enough Republicans to form a club, let alone have a newsletter. ... oh wait it's in Amherst. Still! Wow.

[1] Only, you know, 90% of things.

[2] I guess I could vote for Kennedy --- he's actually pro-gay marriage, which surprised me --- but he also wants to end the Federal Department of Education and thinks the free market is the solution to practically everything. That said, I expected to prefer Brown to him given that he identifies as the Tea Party candidate, and surprisingly, after reading his issues statements, I don't. I still prefer Coakley, though.

EDIT: I'm told that the images render in Firefox on the Mac but not in Safari or Chrome. If anyone has any idea what's up there, I'm curious, but I don't have time to debug it right now, I spent too much time writing this already.