The National Republican Congressional Committee hit the airwaves in New York's 24th District with another ad attacking Democrat Mike Arcuri's record as district attorney. This one -- the latest in a barrage that isn't likely to subside until Election Day -- strikes a theme similar to the Willie Horton ad that sank Michael Dukakis' presidential ambitions in 1988.
The ad begins with a photo of a man named Thomas Griffiths, who the announcer says served time for felony sex abuse and was later jailed for another sex crime. After Griffiths cooperated with the Oneida County district attorney's office, one of Arcuri's deputies wrote a letter on Griffiths' behalf to the parole board. But Griffiths was arrested again after his release, leading the announcer to accuse Arcuri of breaking his promise to "create a safer community."
According to the New York State Department of Correctional Services, which has a searchable database of Thomas Griffiths' records, he was arrested for sex-related crimes in 1990 and 1994. When up for parole in 1998, Oneida County Assistant District Attorney Scott D. McNamara wrote a favorable letter that apparently had little impact (Griffiths remained in the system for four more years). But just 18 months after his release, he was arrested again for criminal possession of a controlled substance. He is still serving out his sentence.
What type of impact will the ad have on Arcuri? There's no question that the attacks on his character are will pay off to some degree on November 7. Whether voters decide to stay home or simply refuse to pull the lever for someone they view with suspicion (thanks in part to the stir created by the phone-sex ad last week), it's a strategy the NRCC seems eager to push from now until Election Day.
Meanwhile, if you want to help Republican Ray Meier, a solid conservative who is running this competitive race, please consider donating to his campaign via Rightroots.
Ordinarily, I like to vote for the person, not just the party, and I’ve even voted for a Democrat a couple of times. When it comes to crime issues, however, there is quite a difference between the two parties, so it’s worthwhile to look at their collective records. Bill Clinton, for example, told us that he would buy us 100,000 new police, but he didn’t tell us that even in the first year his federal money (that’s our taxes, that have been sent through the money laundering system in Washington) would only pay 75% of the new salaries, and that by the fourth year that would drop to none. Here are some new police, now you figure out how to pay them; how’s that for fighting crime? Democrats seem to have a bias against law enforcement, so they prefer to pass laws that avoid sending anyone to jail, and favor judges who look for any excuse to go easy on the offenders. There’s only so much that the police can do if nothing happens to the crooks, to keep them off the streets after the police do their job; but the liberals think it’s not nice to put someone in jail. They like to talk about hiring more police (which they may or may not ever actually do) because it sounds good but doesn’t require really doing anything mean to the criminals.
Finally, the usual course of debating about crime is that shortly we go from crime to gun control and end up debating about the National Rifle Association. I appreciate the two letters the Herald published on Monday, showing that Massachusetts has plenty of gun control but it only affects the honest people, as usual. In 1984 I had a chance to meet one of those liberal professors (at U. Mass Amherst) who write papers about crime. He said that he and his colleagues, being good liberals, and gun control being the acid test of liberalism, applied for a grant with the idea that they would go through the statistics and establish the foundation of gun control once and for all, and they found instead that there isn’t any.
