Spot throwing dirt on Lujan Grisham has errors
The latest television commercial from Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Pearce shows a shovel pitching dirt over photos of and quotations about his Democratic rival, Michelle Lujan Grisham.
It’s an illustration of what Pearce claims were her “dirty” business practices.
Dig a bit deeper, however, and some of the dirt of Pearce’s broadside washes away.
His 30-second ad offers little substantiation for some of its sensational claims, and it contains at least one outright whopper, or error, depending on your point of view. The Pearce campaign has already said it will correct the inaccuracy in a revised ad.
Lujan Grisham’s campaign had called for the spot to be removed from the airwaves this week.
“It’s inexplicable that this hateful, disgusting attack ad is continuing to be allowed to reach New Mexico voters,” Lujan Grisham’s campaign manager, Dominic Gabello, said in a statement.
The ad is the first from either side in the gubernatorial contest to take a directly negative approach.
With its focus on Lujan Grisham’s former partnership in a company that helped to administer the state’s highrisk medical insurance pool, Pearce’s ad takes gratuitous leaps backed with questionable substance.
The commercial pegs its claims about Lujan Grisham and Delta Consulting Group on “news reports,” but a conspicuously incorrect attribution mars this assertion.
The ad, with its cartoonish flourish of dirt being shoveled over, states that Lujan Grisham’s “top cronies” have been “caught red-handed trying to bury evidence” of her “corruption” by filing a lawsuit against the state auditor.
It offers a quote from a piece published by New Mexico Political Report, a well-regarded online publication, as evidence. But New Mexico Political Report never published a story using that quote. The site didn’t even write about Lujan Grisham and Delta on the date, May 30, cited in the ad.
The quotation in the ad was instead from New Mexico Political Journal, a conservative-slanted blog, which wrote about the suit, filed by the New Mexico Medical Insurance Pool, on Sept. 2.
A Pearce campaign spokesman, Kevin Sheridan, on Tuesday said the citation of a nonexistent Political Report story in place of the Political Journal was a “typo.”
“Please forgive us,” said Sheridan, not striking a conciliatory tone. “It’s not easy keeping all of Michelle Lujan Grisham’s corruption stories straight.”
He said a version of the ad with “fixed” attribution had been shipped to television stations.
Sheridan did not respond to questions about the apparently invented date of publication of May 30. The lawsuit referenced in the ad wasn’t even filed in state District Court until August.
The lawsuit centers around a dispute between the state auditor and New Mexico Medical Insurance Pool, the entity Delta Consulting Group helped to manage. The Republican state auditor, Wayne Johnson, has ordered a special audit, seeking to look into the pool’s finances. But the pool says it is not subject to that requirement as it is a nonprofit entity created by the Legislature rather than a formal state agency.
It sued in state District Court, seeking a judge’s agreement. The pool says it has nothing to hide, and has posted annual audits it has conducted dating back to 2007 on its website.
Lujan Grisham divested from Delta last year. Pearce’s ad claims the congresswoman, formerly a state Cabinet secretary, used “her connections” with the administration of former Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson to originally win the contracts to manage the highrisk pool.
But the state superintendent of insurance has said the contracts were awarded through competitive bidding processes.
Pearce’s ad provided no basis for the “connections” allegation, and a “background material” document provided by the campaign included no support for it, either.
The advertisement also claims Lujan Grisham’s involvement with Delta Consulting Group was called “morally repugnant” by “leading Democrats.” But the author of that quote was Jeff Apodaca, who lost to Lujan Grisham in the Democratic primary in June.
The other Democrat in that primary race, state Sen. Joe Cervantes, also took shots at Lujan Grisham over Delta in the primary’s closing weeks, but political opponents scrambling for a foothold can hardly qualify as representative of a consensus of the party’s upper echelon.
Another quote presented by the ad as proof of Lujan Grisham’s chicanery was attributed to an Albuquerque Journal news report. But the line that Lujan Grisham was “exerting political influence” to boost Delta again came from Apodaca, and was not a conclusion of the Albuquerque Journal story.
There are valid questions to ask, and that have been asked, about Lujan Grisham’s work with Delta. She defends it and the continued existence of the state’s high-risk pool. But her opponents, of both parties now, have sought to keep the allegation of concerted malfeasance alive.
It would be easier to take the attack seriously if Pearce hadn’t taken liberties with sourcing and significant details.
AD TRANSCRIPT
Michelle Lujan Grisham. Exposed by news reports for shady self-dealing.
A pattern of corruption so deep leading Democrats called Grisham’s greed morally repugnant.
Using her connections with the Richardson administration to land exclusive state insurance contracts, Delta Consulting Group raked in millions, overcharging vulnerable New Mexicans, fleecing poor patients with higher premiums.
Now Grisham’s top cronies caught redhanded trying to bury evidence. Dishonest and dirty, shamelessly corrupt.