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April 16, 2014 08:23 AM UTC

Another GOP Obamacare Udall Hit Rates "Mostly False"

  • 11 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

mostlyfalse

The Denver Post's Lynn Bartels reports, Politifact's Truth-o-Meter snags another one:

"Mark Udall has voted with the president 99 percent of the time. He lied to us about our health care. He increased our taxes. He voted against the Second Amendment. He cast the deciding vote for Obamacare," [GOP Senate candidate Cory] Gardner told Jefferson County Republicans during their assembly in March.

PolitiFact, a Pulitzer-prize winning enterprise of the Tampa Bay Times, checked out the claim. PolitiFact researches statements and rates the accuracy on what it calls its "Truth-O-Meter." The ratings are True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False and Pants on Fire.

"Because Udall had consistently sided with the Democratic leadership in votes related to the act, he was not among the handful of undecided senators who (Majority Leader Harry) Reid had to wrangle as the vote was approaching," PolitiFact wrote.

"We rate this claim Mostly False."

As Bartels reports, Cory Gardner's campaign didn't react well to the news.

"It looks like Politifact's pants are on fire this time," he said…

Rather than get sidetracked by the Gardner campaign's eyerolling dis on a Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checker, let's look at Politifact's patiently redundant analysis of Gardner's claim that Sen. Mark Udall "cast the deciding vote for Obamacare." We're pretty sure we've covered this same semantic silliness at least once or twice since 2010:

[Udall] consistently sided with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in votes relating to the health care law, and he offered several amendments to the bill either as a sponsor or a co-sponsor.

By contrast, then-Sen. Ben Nelson was widely considered a holdout whose late-in-the-game announcement of support was key to the vote’s success…

59 senators…also voted to end debate — and the exact same thing could be said about them. [Pols emphasis] Because Udall had consistently sided with the Democratic leadership in votes related to the act, he was not among the handful of undecided senators who Reid had to wrangle as the vote was approaching. We rate this claim Mostly False.

So yes, folks, this is mindless rhetorical gameplaying. Every Democratic Senator "cast the deciding vote for Obamacare." To be perfectly honest, we would rather see Politifact take a stand on on the much more misleading statement from Gardner they cite from a recent FOX News interview, that "335,000 Coloradans lost their health insurance." As we have explained over and over in this space, that statement is grossly deceptive, since over 90% of those "cancellation notices" were in fact renewal notices, thousands found better deals via the Obamacare marketplace, and–most importantly–we now know that the number of insured Americans has gone up, not down, since the rollout of Obamacare.

Bottom line: arguing over who cast "the deciding vote for Obamacare," like building one's entire case for election on attacking Obamacare, is a waste of everyone's time, and that includes Cory Gardner. While the fact checkers hammer away at the falsehoods, voters can see with their own eyes now that Obamacare is not the disaster they've been told it would be. Obamacare won't be the message Cory Gardner campaigns on this fall–because if it is, the race will be long over.

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11 thoughts on “Another GOP Obamacare Udall Hit Rates “Mostly False””

  1. Since roll call votes are taken alphabetically, technically, Sen. Wydan, as the 60th vote, was the deciding vote on the cloture, and Tom Udall, Senator from New Mexico, was the deciding vote on final passage. 

    Same last name, easy to get the two mixed up I suppose, I know I do it all the time 😉

  2. Each of the 60 Senators who voted in favor were the deciding votes bcause it required 60 votes to pass.

    Politifact is just playing politics with the facts.

    1. Speaking of playing politics with the facts…

      You don't even have an understanding of basic parliamentary procedure, just shut up already. 

    2. The deciding vote would mean the single decisive one. Lets say they were at 59 for cloture and one person was undecided and was finally persuaded to vote one way or the other. That could be considered the deciding vote even though all votes count equally as you point out. Having pointed that out by saying that they all were deciding votes, what you're really saying is that none of them was the deciding vote, genius.

  3. We all know Udall cast the deciding vote for Udallcare.  I mean, it has his name on it for Pete's sake !  Obamacare must just be something else.

    I have a news tip for you today – did you hear that Cory Gardner's health insurance policy got cancelled, along with millions of other Coloradans ?  Its true !

    And if you have a choice to believe Politifact or Cory Gardner,  whom are you naturally going to believe ?  Of course, Cory Gardner !  I mean really, its not even a contest !

    We'll sift through all this misinformation together AC !  Freedom !!!!

  4. Cory Gardner is not getting off to a great start. Mark Udall seems to be doing a good job labeling Gardner an out of touch extremist. Those AFP ads are just lame

    1. Concur.

      What's more, it's actually past the point of "start". The second quarter of this thing's about a third of the way gone, and gardner's still trying to find his footing. Not stride………….footing.

      In reality it's not a fair fight. gardner is at best a poor to marginally competitive candidate, in over his head on the stage he's trying to compete at.  His history of mind bendingly baggerish comments, his problems with the stories he's made up about a cancelled insurance plan and refusing a paycheck during the shutdown, and his fabricated 335,000 cxls' claim actually are the MINOR problems the incompetent campaigner is saddled with.

      What kills him……….and this is really big…………is history re: his votes on the floor as a U.S. House Representative. He's a radical "conservative" idealogue. Mean, nasty,  literally without empathy, unabashedly for sale, he's everything to a tee what people at the state wide level despise about politics.

      Even Colorado republicans were turned off by his callous "no" votes on Sandy relief vs. his empty rhetoric on our own local catastrophe last September.

      The electorate in an ultra goobery county like weld in no way resembles that of a purple state. Birtherism doesn't translate state wide. And changing course from full out anti womens' health to suddenly "opposing" eggism was met with scorn and ridicule.

      Not that he's not the best they had to go up against Senator Udall. He is. It's a glaring spotlight on what the republican party is today.

      Pathetic, angry, incompetent, with no solutions to problems of this century.

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