UPDATE: Former Sen. Ted Harvey is just kind of saying whatever he wants to in response to the controversy he created, assuming there’s no such thing as bad publicity–telling the Washington Post:
“It took President Trump to lower black unemployment and create jobs for the African American community, in addition to passing criminal justice reform. Joe Biden, on the other hand, is simply giving lip-service for votes. That’s the point President Obama made in his book, and we have every right to use his own words — in his own voice — in the political forum.”
But then saying the opposite on local TV last night:
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Harvey told Next with Kyle Clark. “It’s not misleading.”
“It doesn’t say that [Obama’s] saying that about Biden,” Harvey said. [Pols emphasis]
Obviously, Ted Harvey’s not being honest with one of these news outlets.
We’re guessing it’s the one with the smaller audience?
—–
USA TODAY’s Savannah Behrmann reports via the Pueblo Chieftain on a scandal brewing ahead of the South Carolina Democratic primary over an ad attacking Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden using dreadfully out of context comments made by former President Barack Obama–so far out of context that Obama is demanding the ad be taken down:
PolitiFact found that the audio is Obama reading a quotation from a barber about Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, where the man says, “Plantation politics. Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality rampant. But when the so-called black committeemen came around election time, we’d all line up and vote the straight Democratic ticket. Sell our souls for a Christmas turkey.”
The ad comes from the Committee to Defend the President, and aired on local CBS affiliates in South Carolina before Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Charleston. Obama’s office said his lawyers would be sending the PAC a cease-and-desist letter.
Obama spokeswoman Katie Hill told USA TODAY in a statement that, ”[T]his despicable ad is straight out of the Republican disinformation playbook, and it’s clearly designed to suppress turnout among minority voters in South Carolina by taking President Obama’s voice out of context and twisting his words to mislead viewers.”
“In the interest of truth in advertising, we are calling on TV stations to take this ad down and stop playing into the hands of bad actors who seek to sow division and confusion among the electorate,” the statement continues.
The so-called “Committee to Defend the President PAC” was known in a previous iteration as the “Stop Hillary PAC,” both chaired by former GOP state Sen. Ted Harvey of Highlands Ranch. Back in 2015, Stop Hillary PAC was profiled along with a number of other similar organizations in a Politico report on what’s become known in the political organizing industry as a “ScamPAC”–political committees that raise lots of money to “independently” support a candidate, but in practice spend most of the money on salaries and offices. In the case of Harvey’s Stop Hillary PAC, the committee “spent more than 87 percent of [what] they raised on operating expenses.”
On the one hand, we suppose it’s good that Ted Harvey is actually spending at least some of the money his PAC is raking in to “Defend The President” on, you know, defending the president–as opposed to just paying Ted Harvey and a few cronies slaving away at America’s most demanding job. Which if you haven’t heard, is sitting around a conference room table coming up with political cheap shots.
But given how this ad appears to be backfiring on former Sen. Harvey, giving him money is still not an investment we’d recommend to anyone without money to literally burn.
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Is this the same Ted Harvey who once upon a time sent so much junk mortgage mail that looked like it came from the federal government that there was a complaint filed?
I gotta get in on some of this fundraising. Should I register R first?