PA Bill Number: HB1472
Title: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contributions ...
Description: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contrib ...
Last Action: Referred to STATE GOVERNMENT
Last Action Date: Apr 22, 2024
The lie that defines Heather Arnet's Penna. Senate campaign :: 10/11/2015
What gives politics a bad name or an even worse name than it already had?
At least in this election cycle it's the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, its executive director, Joe Aronson, and Heather Arnet, of Mt. Lebanon, the Democrats' nominee to fill the 37th Senatorial District seat vacated by Matt Smith.
A television ad by the committee, known as the PSDCC, and by “Heather for Harrisburg,” Ms. Arnet's campaign apparatus, claims flat out that Guy Reschenthaler, the Republican nominee of Jefferson Hills, “will cut Medicare and Social Security.”
That, of course, would be a mighty feat for Mr. Reschenthaler, should he be elected to this state Senate seat.
“How does THAT work?,” I emailed Mr. Aronson last week. He responded in a telephone call that was so dissembling and so discombobulated as to be incoherent — denial in the round, if you will — and impossible to quote. It was Orwellian gobbledygook by design, rest assured.
First, Aronson intimated that the Reschenthaler camp must have, all of a sudden, notified the media of a spot that had been running for three weeks. No one from Reschenthaler's campaign contacted me.
Then, Aronson tried to defend the ad's assertion by noting, in true political non sequiturial fashion, that it came essentially from Reschenthaler's own words, taken from the audio, used in the commercial, of a generalized remark about the unchecked and unsustainable growth of what indeed is the entitlement state.
But, “How can Guy Reschenthaler cut Medicare and Social Security?,” I asked Aronson, repeatedly.
Cue the hack of a flack who can't defend the use of an impossibility to smear the opposition in pursuit of scaring senior citizens. Aronson couldn't give a straight answer. And he likely wouldn't do it even if you skewered him on a spit and tried to slow-roast it out of him.
Aronson's four-flushing then turned to affectatious bumfuzzling. That Reschenthaler couldn't cut Medicare and Social Security, a fact, and that the ad was deceitful, another fact, was my “opinion,” he kept saying.
Politics as usual? Some will argue that. But that makes them as dishonorable and dishonest as Aronson and Arnet.
Ms. Arnet did not respond to two requests to her campaign website for a comment.
By the way, if Reschenthaler made the same kind of ludicrous allegations — say, “Heather Arnet will raise your Medicare and Social Security taxes!” — this column would disembowel him, his campaign and his surrogates just the same.
The Heather Arnet ad is not “politics as usual.” It is lying. And it is a prevarication to scare a specifically targeted cohort of the electorate — the aged, the infirm, the disabled, the retired on fixed incomes — who might believe that Reschenthaler would do what he can't possibly do.
Thus, the Arnet ad preys on a vulnerable population. That's despicable and a sign of a poltroonish party and an equally cowardly candidate prepared to do and say anything to win. And that fact should not be lost on voters on Nov. 3.
If this is how Heather Arnet acts in a campaign, how will she act in the Pennsylvania Senate? A discerning electorate already has its answer.
Colin McNickle is Trib Total Media's director of editorial pages (412-320-7836 or cmcnickle@tribweb.com).
http://triblive.com/opinion/colinmcnickle/9156979-74/arnet-reschenthaler-aronson#axzz3oIlXb1EF
