October 27, 2014 11:39 AM UTC

Argumentum in Terrorem: Gardner, Beauprez Appeal To Fear

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Colorado Independent's Susan Greene has a must-read story out today, discussing the late-game turn by GOP U.S. Senate candidate Cory Gardner to an overtly fear-based foreign policy message against incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall:

WITH a week until this off-year election, Republicans had two options to prod their party members to vote.

One was…to pull months of punches and put happy faces on the combative GOP challengers seeking to unseat the state’s Democratic governor and U.S. senator. The other was to try to scare the bajeezus out of voters.

They’ve chosen the latter.

“Vote like your life depends on it,” reads a recent mailer authorized by Republican U.S. Senate candidate Cory Gardner’s campaign. It features a shadowy picture of four faceless jihadists-looking-types brandishing guns. [Pols emphasis]

Then there’s the $3.5 million TV ad by crisis creator Karl Rove’s political spin-machine Crossroads GPS attacking U.S. Sen. Mark Udall’s national security credentials. It stars a 30-something woman identified only as “Melissa, mother of five,” sitting on somebody’s American dreamy front porch holding an iPad…

National security has traditionally been a strong point for Sen. Udall, both from his time in the U.S. House and in the Senate. Udall serves on the Armed Services Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence, and generally has a voting record that voters like: Udall voted against the Iraq war, but has voted to support troops in the field with appropriations unlike many other Democrats. Udall's high profile on issues like National Security Agency domestic surveillance and the Senate's battle with the Central Intelligence Agency over interrogation policy, long before this election, give Udall credibility as he positions himself at odds with the Obama administration.

So naturally, knocking Udall down on this core issue is a big priority for the GOP.

The hit on Udall over foreign policy in the latter stages of the campaign has made use of the two most popular foreign policy scare stories in circulation nationally: the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). We talked last week about Gardner's highly misleading comments about Ebola in a recent debate, refuted strongly by Politifact. Likewise, Factcheck.org notes that the attacks on Udall over ISIS from Crossroads GPS, originating in an out-of-context quote from a debate last summer, have little basis in reality:

Udall didn’t dismiss ISIL as nothing to worry about. Instead, he said the terrorist group wasn’t an “imminent” threat to the U.S. but will be in the future if the country doesn’t respond in the Middle East now.

This isn’t the only attack ad to pick up on the Udall quote. The NRSC highlighted it in an ad also portraying Udall as soft on terrorism, as did Udall’s Republican opponent, Rep. Cory Gardner.

But the Crossroads ad is the only one to actually cite a news article that supports what Udall said. While the woman in the ad says, “As a mom and a Marine, I know the danger is closer to home than Sen. Udall seems to think,” an on-screen graphic cites an August USA Today article headlined, “Returning Islamic State fighters could threaten USA.” That article quotes experts saying that an attack on U.S. soil isn’t an imminent threat, but there’s concern about what could happen if fighters holding Western passports return home.

In the Colorado gubernatorial race, the big story over the weekend was the blowback against GOP candidate Bob Beauprez for his factually-challenged misuse of the murder of the director of the Colorado Department of Corrections last year in campaign ads–ads that became toxic after the widow of director Tom Clements told Beauprez to stop falsely politicizing her husband's murder. There is a common theme between Beauprez's untruthful attack on Hickenlooper over Clements' murder and the misleading attacks on Sen. Udall over national security.

The common theme is a willingness to lie to people in order to scare them. It's not our purpose to rule on whether this is an effective tactic, as in the right circumstances it surely can be–but it does generally occur for certain reasons. We'll leave it to our readers to discuss in this case what those may be.