This is a follow up to my first post on the Patty Weiss attacks on Gabrielle Giffords at the forum for Democratic candidates for Congress in Arizona's 8th District on 8/29. This forum is being broadcast daily on our local Public Access cable company, so it remains a topic worth commenting on further.
Because it is being broadcast, I can now quote Weiss precisely. She claimed that this election offered "a clear choice between" herself and her "real Democratic values" and Giffords who used to be a Republican and has the "remarkable, astonishing" record of "voting with Huffman (one of the Republican candidates running for this open seat) 90% of the time."
She then went on to claim that she was not engaged in "negative campaigning" which forced most of the audience and several of the candidates, including Giffords and Francine Shachter to laugh aloud.
Are her attacks true and legitimate? Not even close. Giffords was registered Republican, did so at age 18 and remained so while she was apolitical. When she decided that things were not going well here in Arizona (we have a habit of showing up last or next to last in state rankings of all sorts, education, teen suicide, that kind of thing) and that she better see what she could do about it, she examined both parties and changed her registration.
The 90% one is much more interesting though. Did she vote with Huffman 90% of the time? No. First, Huffman is in the House, and Giffords was serving in the Senate. The bills they vote on can be and often are significantly different while having the same number. Which is why we often see a split vote in the House and unanimous in the Senate, or vice versa. So no direct comparison is even possible without reading through each version of each bill for each of several votes, something no one has done.
Is the above a quibble, did she still vote "with Huffman" a "remarkable, astonishing" amount of the time? Well, everyone in the legislature did, really. Because Huffman is Mister Unanimous. He shows up to vote mostly when it will be unanimous, and otherwise he manages to have other more important things to do. One year he missed 140 something votes out of about 530...sorry I forget the exact number. Of these, most that he missed were split vote bills.
Huffman does, however, stick around to vote for education bills and against pro-life bills, with the Democrats both times. Which we should all commend him for. But it does raise the percentage that he and Giffords, and all the other Democrats, vote the same (more or less, accounting for what I explained before). However, clearly Huffman is voting with Giffords then, not the other way around. And this becomes very clear when we look at votes where Huffman and Giffords voted the same, on contested bills, and compare them to Graf, one of Huffman's Republican opponents. On vote after vote, Graf voted against both of them. So Patty Weiss is apparently upset that Giffords voted with Huffman and against extremists like Graf (who wants to repeal the 16th Amendment and end all personal income taxes, round up all illegals and deport them, etc.). What kind of "Democratic values" are those, Patty?
So this 90% figure is false, and to whatever extent Huffman and Giffords voted approximately the same it was on bills where everyone else also voted the same, or where Huffman voted with the Democrats. Hardly evidence that Gabrielle Giffords is lacking in "real Democratic values."
But these lies and attempted smears do force us to question what values Patty Weiss has, launching false and vicious attacks on the leading candidate while 18% behind in the polls and her own campaign floundering. It is astonishing and remarkable how dedicated Weiss seems to be to helping the Republicans keep this seat.