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On Point: Economics for idiots

Published October 20, 2006 at midnight

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"What's good politics is bad economics; what's bad politics is good economics."

- Professor Eugene Baer

Welcome to Colorado's election season, when even candidates and parties who know better stoop to populist claptrap. They do so to attract the sort of voters who believe ExxonMobil should fill up their tank for free - and perhaps throw in a free coffee mug just to keep them smiling.

Republican Rick O'Donnell (whom this paper endorses for Congress elsewhere on this page) and the Republican Party obviously know there is nothing incompatible with advocating greater use of renewable energy while promoting oil and gas production. Even a quick transition from fossil fuels to renewables will take decades and include many bumps along the way. It would be madness to block additional domestic oil and gas production in the meantime, as many environmentalists unfortunately hope to do.

Never mind such stubborn facts. The National Republican Congressional Committee is airing an ad on O'Donnell's behalf that simply ignores them.

"Candidate Ed says we need renewable energy," the ad says of Democrat Ed Perlmutter. "Legislator Ed sponsored a plan The Denver Post called the gas industry's dream bill. The Post said the legislature appears ready to kowtow to the oil and gas industry with Perlmutter's bill. And this year Perlmutter reported holding more than $100,000 in oil interests. Ed Perlmutter: renewable energy or Big Oil."

To be sure, O'Donnell isn't responsible for the ad or technically able to coordinate with the NRCC. Still, he can't be too heartbroken it's running since he made a similar argument in a candidates' debate this week, according to Perlmutter spokesman Scott Chase.

The bill the ad refers to was a complex measure dealing with how certain costs are deducted from royalty payments to the private owners of mineral rights. As for Perlmutter's "oil interests," he invested in Elk Petroleum, hardly a proxy for Big Oil.

But such subtleties are beside the point to architects of the ad. They want voters to believe that Perlmutter is a hypocrite for doing anything that would please oil and gas producers while talking up renewable energy - as if our dependence on fossil fuels were somehow the companies' fault.

It's economics for idiots - and yet more evidence that an election is but a couple of weeks away.

Reining in political speech

The El Paso County district attorney came to his senses Thursday - at least for the moment - when he put off charging a prominent Republican operative under a Colorado law that is almost certainly unconstitutional, at least if free speech still means anything these days.

Incredibly, this rogue law places a higher standard for accuracy on political speech than on other kinds of expression. And never mind that the First Amendment was designed precisely as a protection mainly for political speech.

Most DAs are of course smart enough to stay out of the business of regulating campaign ads. But El Paso County DA John Newsome at first decided to plunge into the swamp and charge Alan Philp of the Trailhead Group because Trailhead ran an ad misstating the record of a former small-town police chief who is seeking a state Senate seat.

The ad claimed police mistakes in one case resulted in 14 felony charges being reduced to one misdemeanor. In fact, they were reduced to a single felony. As GOP attorney Scott Gessler explains, "Trailhead researched the issue, had backup documents, but erred. The ad ran for a week. Trailhead did not learn of the error in the ad until after the criminal complaint was filed with the DA (and of course accompanied by a press release)."

At least Philp is sorry. Incredibly, the people who put out what is surely the most recklessly irresponsible and false ad of the year in Colorado defended it to the end. That ad claimed Republican House candidate Jeff Shaw "wants to cut coverage for mammograms" and other medical screenings - not because he'd said any such thing, but because he is supported by an independent committee that in turn is supported by insurance companies, which in turn had taken a position against some legislative mandates for health coverage.

The group responsible for this convoluted logic was Main Street Colorado. But according to a News story, "Main Street Colorado President Jennifer Coken stood by the accuracy of the ads attacking Shaw 'at the time' they ran because he hadn't publicly stated his support for preventive screening."

No, and he hadn't publicly stated his opposition to strangling seniors in nursing homes, either. Would it be OK to accuse him of favoring that, too?

If Philp deserves a criminal charge, then obviously Coken does, too. But of course neither does. Voters will fall for the occasional whopper, but at some point they wise up and detect who the liars are. Political speech is brutal, merciless and frequently even false, but over time it regulates itself.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at .