Turns out I was not the only TV viewer to note a Heather Wilson campaign commercial in which Mary Ann Weems, the art promoter, describes the Congresswoman as "independent" and "nonpartisan."
That caught David Alire Garcia’s eye, too, he told us in yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal, so he set about checking it against the record.
His Op-Ed piece concluded she is neither independent nor non-partisan but rather a loyal, dependable vote for the GOP leadership. She voted with her party 91% of the time last year, 90% the previous year, 94% a year earlier, according to Congressional Quarterly records.
Alire Garcia notes that Steve Schiff voted the GOP line 78% of the time and Manuel Lujan 65% in the last three years of their respective tenures.
Admittedly, my political bias leads me to enjoy a piece like this; Wilson, like her political godfather, Pete Domenici, gets little scrutiny from the pencil press, and none from television "news."
But it’s also good journalism The daily newspapers should apply this formula to all our leading politicians at regular, predictable intervals. Leaders in non-electoral positions, too.
Mind you, what Alire Garcia did, while praiseworthy, is not rocket science. He took the candidate’s claims and compared them with the record. It reminded me of a recent New York Times evaluation of the new I Mac G5 - consumer reporting, in a sense, for the voter.
More, more.