Capps ad was questionable, but Mitchum suit is a loser

Chris Mitchum has about as much chance of getting Lois Capps to resign her congressional seat as Katcho Achadjian does of winning another Assembly term.

The likelihood of either is next to zero because Achadjian would have to change the state law that will term him out in 2016, and Mitchum would have to somehow criminalize sketchy campaigning or persuade the congresswoman to voluntarily step down, which is never, ever going to happen.

Nevertheless, Mitchum went ahead last week and sued Capps for defamation over two ads he says deliberately took his words out of context and ultimately cost him the 2014 election for the 24th District congressional seat.

At issue is a statement Mitchum made to Cal Poly TV, which in its entirety reads: “I do not intend to go to Washington to represent the 24th district to bring back baseball fields, that’s not why I am going. I am going to fight for my country, and I happen to be from the 24th district.”

In the campaign ads supporting Capps, that quotation was whittled down to an obviously unfathomable comment, in which Mitchum merely says, “I do not intend to go to Washington to represent the 24th district.”

This edit is clearly more inflammatory than him just vowing not to build baseball fields, although even the entire quotation in context doesn’t make it sound like he really would have been looking out for this area much.

Still, I clearly remember when I first saw this ad last fall. It was so blatantly ripped from a larger quotation as to be downright comical.

Certainly, no right-minded candidate would ever say such a thing. I scowled a bit at the tactic and would expect better from the campaigns of our elected representatives.

In addition to naming the congresswoman and Friends of Lois Capps, the suit targets the Democratic Congressional Campaign Commission, which it slams for spending nearly $100,000 in advertising in the last weekend of the campaign.

And there’s a problem with that how? The world we live in dictates that you must spend money to win elections. We can thank the U.S. Supreme Court for that.

The cold, hard fact is that political campaigns that were already horrible bits of nail-peeling torture have only become more so as each ensuing bit of regulation is stripped away.

So yeah, I wish Lois Capps wouldn’t allow questionable practices in her campaign (if she did).

I wish bags of cash weren’t distributed all around in desperate attempts to win a few more votes.

I wish Republicans would field more moderate candidates who are actually interested in reasonable governing and that more people would tell Rush Limbaugh to shut up.

But I’m likely not going to get my way on those issues or many others involving American politics.

Chris Mitchum wishes Capps supporters wouldn’t edit his quotes to make him sound like a careless nitwit. But if he thinks he’s going to win a defamation claim, he’s more naïve than I am.

This story was originally published February 21, 2015 at 6:37 PM with the headline "Capps ad was questionable, but Mitchum suit is a loser."