You want to know what’s awesome? Waking up on Sunday morning to find this kind of endorsement in the local paper:
[Patrick] Murphy enjoys a significant advantage over Fitzpatrick in financial resources, and he’s utilized his war chest to denigrate his opponent at every turn. Rather than stand on his own record since January 2007, Murphy’s strategy has been to berate Fitzpatrick for his performance in Congress in 2005-06 during President Bush’s second term. He’s even bashed Fitzpatrick for his service as a county commissioner, an office he vacated in 2004.
In one very telling episode, Murphy spent virtually his entire endorsement interview with our editorial board taking shot after shot at the challenger while answering none of our questions. It was, in a word, a “terrible” performance.
And really, it gets no better than their succinct summary of what’s on the line in this race – surely not something that will help Patrick Murphy’s chances:
When you get beyond the nasty rhetoric and innuendo, what you have is this: Murphy, a loyal soldier in Barack Obama’s Democratic army who has voted consistently to advance the president and his party’s agenda, versus Fitzpatrick, who believes that agenda is wrong for America and promises to vote to undo a lot of it.
The choice for voters should be simple: If you agree with what the Democrats have done and plan to do, then there’s no stronger advocate in Congress than Patrick Murphy. On the other hand, if you don’t like what Congress is doing, then Fitzpatrick is your guy.
Well that certainly explains why he’s avoiding his own record. As Sebastian said when I read him that piece today, there’s no way that Murphy will try to run on his record because as soon as people figure out he’s not really the moderate he promised, they’ll vote him out. It certainly looks like that might happen.
Oh, and you want to know their big complaint against Mike Fitzpatrick’s campaign?
Fitzpatrick hasn’t been a choir boy in all this, either. While several of his mailed campaign pieces feature a smiling Mike on one side, the other side shows unflattering pictures of Murphy as if he were some sort of demon.
Yes, we have an incumbent who is too scared of voters to actually talk about any of the policies he has supported that have kept us in a state of economic uncertainty and reduces hiring, and the other guy uses some less than flattering photos. Seriously, if that’s all they’ve got, then they really need to get a life.