SUBMITTED RELEASE FROM FRIENDS FOR HARRY REID
LAS VEGAS–In a recent New Jersey newspaper profile, Sue Lowden asserted fearlessly, “I have chutzpah.” If her latest TV spot is any indication, that may turn out to be the understatement of her entire campaign.
More than a month after Lowden uttered remarks at a Mesquite town hall that sent her campaign into a tailspin by touching off weeks of national ridicule and caused numerous commentators, including prominent Nevada conservatives and DC Republicans to raise serious doubts about her candidacy, Lowden has taken to the airwaves to address the “Chickens for Checkups” debacle–by looking into the camera and lying.
In Lowden’s new TV spot, she has the “chutzpah” to claim “they want to make this about chickens and checks, a check I wrote decades ago and a statement they’ve taken out of context.”
Lowden’s remarks in Mesquite came in answer to the question, “If you had been in the Senate during this past year, give us an idea of what your health care bill might have looked.” Regarding her claim that the now-famous “Chickens for Checkups” remark was taken out of context–nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, in an interview on Nevada Newsmakers the Monday following her initial remarks in Mesquite, Lowden was given a chance to defend, clarify or walk back her comments. In response, Lowden, in fact, provided additional context for her remarks:
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[L]et’s change the system and talk about what the possibilities are. I’m telling you that this works. You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I’ll paint your house. I mean, that’s the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I’m not backing down from that system.
How’s that for context, Sue?
Not to be forgotten, Lowden’s campaign also circulated a detailed memo in the midst of the blowup defending the practice of bartering. They even went to far as to push around a letter penned by Dr. Robin Titus, a former GOP opponent of Sen. Harry Reid’s, “documenting” that the practice of bartering for health care with items such as “alfalfa hay” or “a bath tub” is one that works empirically.
“It is beyond pathetic that Sue Lowden has decided, more than a month after she uttered remarks that made her a national laughingstock, that she’d go on television and lie about them,” said Reid campaign communications director Kelly Steele. “The hard reality is that Sue Lowden’s campaign has spiraled out of control–and that her shot at the GOP nomination is now circling the bowl–doesn’t change the indisputable fact that she said those words, and was, in fact, quoted in context.”
