CA-32: Race Starts Heating Up

The election for the 32nd Congressional district seat is exactly two weeks away but the race between State Board of Equalization Member Judy Chu and State Senator Gil Cedillo is heating up.

The Los Angeles Times covered the back and forth between the two camps:

Among Judy Chu's slew of mostly positive mailers was one that featured a front-page Los Angeles Times article on state Sen. Gil Cedillo's spending more than $125,000 of his legislative campaign money on expensive dinners, hotels and gifts. The mailer reprinted the April 11 article in full and highlighted two paragraphs contrasting Chu's "frugal record" with a summary of Cedillo's spending.

Cedillo, in two separate pieces that arrived in mailboxes in recent days, used newspaper articles to try to bolster his charge that Chu, a state Board of Equalization member, gave "tax breaks and contracts" to her corporate campaign contributors.

The language used as headlines on the Cedillo mailers, however, came from articles having nothing to do with Chu. One, "This Is an Outrage!" appeared as a quote in a March 16 Los Angeles Times article about anger over bonuses given to executives of AIG, one of the struggling corporations given federal financial aid. Another, "Political Malfeasance and the Financial Meltdown," ran above a syndicated George Will column March 25 in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

Good job of the Times to make it clear that although there are charges and cross-charges from both camps, it does not mean that both parties are equally responsible. Clearly, as the picture above makes clear, Cedillo is not telling the truth.