Or was it? I live on the other side of New York and I didn’t follow the Long Island political news.
I’m assuming most people reading this post are aware that George Santos’ resume has made the news. Santos, who was elected to the House last November, lied about his past on things like his former jobs, his college education, and his ethnic heritage.
This was not obscure stuff. Santos ran a contested election. So why didn’t Robert Zimmerman’s campaign people not find this stuff out before the election and make an issue out of it? Checking your opponent’s background should be Political Campaigning 101.
Or did they? Did all of this come out locally during the campaign?
If it came out locally, it was very local - I live in NYC and didn’t hear anything about it until the NYT report. Apparently, he lied during his 2020 campaign as well, and I can only assume that no one , including his opponents, looked into the truth of these very basic statements because no one imagined he would be lying about where he worked and went to school. I’m actually wondering what prompted the NYT investigation.
My favorite part is how he claimed he is an out gay man, and the scandal part is that he used to be married to a woman.
(In a close second place is his defense of his false claim of Judaism: “I’m not Jewish. What I said was I was Jew-ish.”)
The whole thing is truly baffling.
Then again, it’s truly baffling when notable people agree to comedic parody interviews without being aware of the person who is interviewing them, yet people like Sasha Baron Cohen and Steven Colbert have made a career of that. Does nobody vet anything?
I’m guessing somebody in the Zimmerman campaign tried leaking the story to the media in the hopes that the media would run with it while the Zimmerman campaign could look like they weren’t playing negative politics.
But when the media didn’t bite, the Zimmerman campaign should have just run its own ads and forced the issue.
It’s incredible ineptitude if they failed to check Santos’ background. This was a Congressional race; there should have been some professionals in the room.
Hell, nowadays you run a background check on your own candidate just so you don’t get surprised midway through the campaign.
I will say this… if you have jewish ancestry but you were raised Catholic, then jew “ish” is an apt description. However, I’m not sure it’s been confirmed that he has jewish ancestry.
Except Santos explicitly said, in writing, that he was a Jew (in letters to Jewish political groups). He also said his ancestors were Jews who fled from Europe to Brazil during the Holocaust. This is not true; Santos’ ancestors, who were not Jewish, immigrated to Brazil in the 19th century.
Showing one or two of the resume pads would not have necessarily hurt him as much as, say, an advertisement on his position on abortion.
Putting it all together, it is easy now to see how extraordinary are the lies. He makes TFG seem like an honest man. But something tells me that swing voters do not believe negative advertising (perhaps they are being wise there), and are unlikely to change a vote because of lying about working for an investment bank. Baruch College? Sounds very bad to lie about it to me, but, then, I’m a college graduate.
The Holocaust lie would have hurt him, but it wasn’t caught in time. And coming from a negative ad , it would not have had the same effect as coming from Jewish newspapers.
No. If you believe this, then you haven’t studied on all the lies of Trump.
I don’t wish to argue about this as it would be a hijack to this thread, but I need to point out that’s a very ill-informed statement on your part.
Not defending Santos. He’s a ghastly liar, too – but not on the scale of Trump. One could even argue that without Trump, there would be no Santos. But the Republican Party as a whole no longer punishes lying liars.
It’s especially inept because Santos didn’t come out of nowhere and catch them off guard. He ran for the same seat in 2020. The Democrats should have found all this stuff back then.
Who is the biggest liar, of the big liars, is really a matter of opinion. But suppose I concede they are, as best as one can measure such a slippery thing, equally big liars. Then, given that Trump once won the presidency despite massive evidence of his lies, that suggests Santos-is-a-liar would not have necessarily been a winning campaign theme.
The biggest legal concern for Santos isn’t that he lied about his education and work experience – it’s where he got his money from. He loaned his own campaign $700,000, which he apparently paid himself out of his shell corporation that allegedly manages $80 million in “family assets”. Yet he claimed he had essentially no assets in his 2020 run. He has no explanation for where this money came from. He could be looking at campaign finance violations or financial fraud. The New York AG has already announced she’s looking into it.
I’d argue it myself. Trump is defining deviancy down, and this means that negative ads saying that Santos lies would have had a reduced effectiveness. DeSantis would be too extreme to be elected president, except that, after Trump, he will impress a lot of voters as being a normal Republican.
I’m thinking that the Holocaust lie is the one that now makes Santos un-reelectable in that district. But it would not have been a good look for Zimmerman to question his opponent’s religion. That probably had to come from Jewish media like the Forward, and they missed it.